“Watching Fish At The Flower Harbor”: Landscape, Space, And The Propaganda State In Mao’s China

The earliest iteration of Huagang guanyu was the Lu Garden (廬園 Luyuan), a villa built between 1225 and 1239 by Lu Yunsheng (廬允升), an influential and power- ful eunuch of the Southern Song dynasty.²⁴ The garden was soon in decline but was remembered for the scores of types of exotic fish raised there and for its geographic location beside a harbor at the foot of the Hua Family Mountains (花家山 Huajia shan).²⁵ Therefore, the location’s name, “Hua’s Harbor” (花港 Huagang), did not carry the connotation of “the Flower Harbor,” as painters, poets, designers, and tour- ists would choose to believe in the following centuries. During the Southern Song, this garden consistently elicited artistic and poetic sentiments despite its decline.

With the Southern Song’s demise, Huagang guanyu inevitably underwent ruination because of political disorder.²⁶ During the Qing, the government and local elites set out to reconstruct the garden twice, in 1699 and 1869, for political reasons: the emperor’s commitment to winning over the Jiangnan elites and a commitment to restoring the war- scarred Qing empire in the wake of the Taiping Rebellion (1851–1864), respectively. Itwas in 1699 that the current site of Huagang guanyu was chosen, albeit in an arbitrary way, given that the location of the vanished Lu Garden was unidentifiable.²⁷ Just like the poets of past generations, designers and users of the 1699 site took it for granted that the name of the scenic spot was an indication of the two most essential elements of the garden: the fish and the flower. The Qianlong Emperor, for example, composed a poem with the flower and the fish as its main allusions, echoing the anecdotal story of the philo- sopher Zhuangzi (莊子 369–286 BC) concerning the fish’s absolute freedom.²⁸ As China entered the first half of the twentieth century, Huagang guanyu grew increasingly old and forlorn. As numerous private villas mushroomed on nearby lots, this scenic spot shrank in size and therefore gradually slipped into obscurity. Not only did it cover only a tiny area of merely 0.2 hectare,²⁹ but its reputation as an exhibition center for exotic goldfish also waned as more tourists preferred to enjoy the view of goldfish in Yuquan (玉泉 Jade Spring), a scenic site in a mountainous location northwest of West Lake.³⁰

A plan of remolding and expanding Huagang guanyu was set in motion in 1952, one year before the Soviet specialist A. C. Maxim’s proposal to make Hangzhou “a public space for recreation.”³¹ The planned public park was primarily intended to serve not Hangzhou citizens but rather the occupants of newly built rehabilitation facilities. In so doing, the CCP advanced a political agenda of privileging some social and political groups, such as the workers and the soldiers, over others. Despite this, its planners continued to resort to the rhetoric of serving the Chinese people to justify the revival of this time-honored gar- den. Its chief planner, Yu Senwen (余森文 1904–1992), for example, boasted of Huagang guanyu as the first new-style park constructed after West Lake “returned to the embrace of the people.” To this end, the park’s planners and promoters had to rewrite the history of this scenic spot, transforming it from an emblem of the ruling class’s power and aesthetic values in imperial China into a cultural heritage “long liked by the people” (久為人民喜愛 jiuwei renmin xiai).³² By absorbing the eunuch, emperors, and local officials of imperial China into the category of the “people,” CCP cadres and the architect evaluated Huagang guanyu as a “familiar and pleasing” (喜聞樂見 xiwen lejian) site “easily comprehensible to the masses in order to win their support”³³ and thereby to display socialism’s advantage over the “old society,” typical propaganda rhetoric in Mao’s China.

The supremacy of socialism manifested itself in the park’s unprecedented vastness. By 1964, when the final phase of its construction ended, the park occupied a large swath of territory, about 42 times as big as the one that had existed before 1949.³⁴ The site’s size and the lack thereof in pre-1949 China carried political and ideologi- cal ramifications. A 1956 report filed by cadres in Hangzhou indicated that the city lacked spacious public parks before 1949 because of capitalist private ownership, under which capitalists, landlords, and bureaucrats willfully cut the lakeside area into pieces and shamelessly usurped them. It was the public ownership during the PRC era that enabled “general planning and designing” (總體規劃設計 zongti guihua sheji).³⁵ This claim was well justified because, with the abolition of private owner- ship, the CCP authorities were entitled to requisition the lands of nearby villas and other spaces to considerably expand the park. Conducting “general planning and designing,” however, proved more complicated than CCP officials had presumed.

The plan initially devised in 1952 suggested that Huagang guanyu would be enlarged from about 0.2 to 1.7 hectares by incorporating the lands of neighboring private villas, notably the Jiang Estate (蔣莊 Jiangzhuang). The plan emphatically included a meadow of 1,800 square meters—known as the Great Lawn (大草坪 Da caoping) or the Great Cedar Lawn (雪松大 Xuesong da caoping)—dotted with ornamental plants.³⁶ In the same year, however, the CCP’s municipal committee in Hangzhou tabled another proposal of a far greater magnitude not only to renovate Huagang guanyu but also to connect it to the vast tract of land on the western shore of West Lake:

On the lakeside area in the south, [the areas] of the former Jiang Estate, “Watching Fish at the Flower Harbor,” the Liu Estate [劉莊 Liuzhuang], and Ding Family Mountain [丁家山 Dingjia shan] shall be integrated into a park in a recreational district centering on Chairman Mao’s bronze statue.   [An area] of 5,000 mu

[333.33 hectares] shall be designated as the recreational district.³⁷

This overly ambitious plan, which could have turned the southwestern shore of West Lake—known as the Western Mountain (西山 Xishan) area—into a mammoth public park, bore no fruit principally because the Liu Estate and Ding Family Mountain would soon be overtaken to build Mao Zedong’s villa.

Despite its failure to materialize, this plan happened to conform to the 1953 urban plan drafted by A. C. Maxim. The 1953 plan designated West Lake’s western bank, a relatively remote and isolated place, as the “convalescence zone” (修養區 xiuyang qu), as opposed to the densely populated administrative district on the lake’s northeastern shore and the college town in the north. Despite the Soviet expert’s supreme authority, the 1953 plan did not come to fruition, either. Throughout the 1950s, the Western Mountain area’s serenity attracted various governmental and military institutions nationwide, which built hospitals, sanatoriums, and guesthouses, derailing Hangzhou’s overall urban planning as proposed by Maxim. In hindsight, the mushrooming of all such facilities, along with Mao’s villa, none of which was open to the public, unintentionally precluded the Western Mountain area from undergoing overexploitation and overdevelopment.³⁸

As the ambitious plan became stillborn, Huagang guanyu grew into a sizable public park in its own right. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the construction of the park proceeded in three separate phases. Between 1952 and 1955, in the first phase, the government cleared 14.6 hectares of land west of the Qing-era Huagang guanyu by dismantling an old villa and requisitioning farmlands, vegetable gardens, farmhouses, and ponds. The project officially started in the winter of 1952. In 1953, the soil was prepared, some paths were paved, and work began on digging the Red Fish Pond (紅魚池 Hongyu chi)—the park’s largest fishpond. By late 1954, the 1.1-hectare Peony Garden (牡丹亭 Mudan yuan) was completed. In consequence, the two most significant components of this time-honored site, the fish and the flower, were of- ficially ushered in. In front of the Great Lawn in the northern part of the park, a wooden and bamboo structure named the Green Rain Hall (翠雨廳 Cuiyu ting) was built as a principal resting place beside the lake. The second phase, starting in 1959, was focused on the restoration of the relics of the Qing-era Huagang guanyu park. Consequently, a pavilion was rebuilt to house the stone stele erected by the Qianlong Emperor for Huagang guanyu. During the third phase that started in 1964, the park was further enlarged to occupy an area of 21.3 hectares.³⁹

It merits mentioning that the completion of the three phases did not follow a well-laid blueprint. Rather, this public park’s design and construction were consistently subject to revision and reprogramming for over a decade. Its planned size, for example, changed three times. The first proposal filed in the autumn of 1952 suggested that the park cover an area of less than 2 hectares. The municipal government soon decided to requisition 14.6 hectares of land, and, as shown above, by 1964 the park’s size had further increased by one-third.⁴⁰ The name of the park seemed to stay undetermined for a while. Yu Senwen, director of the Hangzhou Bureau of Gardening Administration (杭州市園林管理局 Hangzhou shi yuanlin guanli ju) and the leading CCP official in charge of the project, for example, chose to call it the Western Mountain Park (西山公園 Xishan gongyuan) when the first phase was completed in 1955, signaling his reluctance to subscribe to the name it had borne in imperial times. As late as 1979, one writer continued to call it Western Mountain Park.⁴¹ As a matter of fact, the controversy surrounding the necessity of preserving and recover- ing the Qing site raged for almost a decade, hinting at a pervasive unwillingness among CCP cadres to appropriate the long-held reputation of Huagang guanyu.⁴²

More intriguingly, a design for the park by the professional landscape architect Sun Xiaoxiang went forth as late as October 1954 and was not completed until September 1955, at the tail end of the first phase. In hindsight, researchers concluded that only a few bridges, the Green Rain Hall, the Great Lawn in the north, and some plants in the area of the Red Fish Pond had been installed strictly in line with Sun’s design drawings. The clearance of the land, the arrangement of the rockery, the vegetation planting, and the building of the Peony Garden took place mostly on the basis of a generalized master plan with no detail. In this sense, the park’s first phase was completed through compromise and collaboration of the architect and builders. In one writer’s words, the construction and the design occurred simultaneously in an “abnormal state” beyond the architect’s control.⁴³

The architect Sun Xiaoxiang was then a professor of landscape design at the Zhejiang Agriculture University (浙江農業大學 Zhejiang nongye daxue) of Hangzhou. He took up Yu Senwen’s invitation to carry out the task of designing the park.⁴⁴ Sun, who had earned a degree in landscape architecture in 1946, was heavily influenced by European-style gardens, particularly those in the International Settlement and the French Concession in Shanghai. Sun once proclaimed that parks in Shanghai, such as Jessfield Park (兆豐公園 Zhaofeng gongyuan; 1914), were his de facto teachers that imparted to him the use of contour lines in landscape design. Hence, for all the chaos arising from the process of design and construction, Sun was given the credit as the park’s chief architect, and Huagang guanyu was hailed as the first garden designed with elevation planning and contour lines, features that had never existed previously in garden design in China.⁴⁵

It would do him an injustice, however, to argue that Sun Xiaoxiang deployed noth- ing but techniques of Euro-American landscape architecture when designing the park Huagang guanyu. In reality, Sun could be best described as an eclectic who was willing to absorb experiences, skills, and styles from varying sources. First of all, Sun embraced elements of the imperial gardens of the Qing. Between September 1953 and July 1954 when he taught in Beijing as a visiting lecturer, he closely observed the buildings and the fish pools at the Summer Palace (頤和園 Yihe yuan), on the basis of which he would later design the Green Rain Hall and the garden for goldfish. Second, Sun gained inspiration from Japanese gardens to rearrange the stonework in the Red Fish Pond by displaying large Japanese-style rocks. Third, Sun pledged to emulate such European gardens as the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh to place emphasis on plant ecology when designing the Peony Garden.⁴⁶ Such an eclectic approach prompted one writer to complain that the park looked overly new and foreign and lacked the allure of Chinese tradition.⁴⁷

Thus, it is fair to argue that Sun Xiaoxiang enjoyed full professional autonomy when selecting the most appropriate styles for the park and jettisoning the Soviet model—namely, the “park of culture and rest.” Although Sun later acknowledged that he purposely avoided the Soviet style, Sun did not mean to play a role as a dissenting intellectual in socialism. Instead, Sun openly sang high praises of the Soviet style, when necessary. In books and essays he later authored during Mao’s time, for example, chapters that promoted styles and techniques of China’s late imperial garden designs are usually prefaced by Sun’s complimentary remarks on the “park of culture and rest.”⁴⁸ For Sun and his contemporaries in China, such rhetoric as the “park of culture and rest” was undoubtedly novel and alien. Scholars have argued that figuring out the socialist system was akin to learning a “foreign language,” and propaganda lent the masses the new and foreign syntax.⁴⁹ Speaking this new language, figuratively and literally, without necessarily a full understanding of it constituted a ritual of loyalty to socialism. Here, it did not matter whether Sun’s utiliza- tion of the new language resulted from his genuine belief or from mere dissimulation. He carved out his autonomous space of professionalism by parroting this new “language.” As landscape architecture was outside the ken of most CCP officials, Sun was able to exercise the privilege of free choice and expression by either heartily endorsing or gener- ally ignoring the Soviet model at this point.⁵⁰

Although he harbored no intention of following the Soviet model, the urban dwell- ers’ rights to rest, rehabilitation, and sightseeing were foregrounded as the justification for building this park in a 1959 article coauthored by Sun Xiaoxiang and his colleague that offered full details of the designing and planning of Huagang guanyu. Sun and his colleague made it clear that the Huagang guanyu park was not a “park of culture and rest” in the Soviet sense. It did not feature athletic facilities because of its “relatively small size.” Nor were there recreational services and playgrounds for children, due to the considerable distance between it and Hangzhou proper and the lack of public transportation.⁵¹ In 2006, Sun proffered another explanation as to why he intentionally avoided building a Soviet-style “park of culture and rest”: he had to take Hangzhou’s local culture and West Lake’s scenery into account.⁵²

Both explanations for not making a “park of culture and rest” are marked with the stamp of the times. The 2006 answer revealed both Sun Xiaoxiang’s eagerness to high- light his professionalism as a designer independent of party officials’ interventions and a politicocultural necessity to lay emphasis on the city’s profound cultural heritage. In the late 1950s, in comparison, the Soviet “park of culture and rest” remained an authoritative landscaping practice from which Sun did not desire to deviate. Therefore, Sun necessarily cited the lack of space as the primary reason Huagang guanyu failed to conform to the Soviet model. Furthermore, the late 1950s proved an apt time to revive China’s “tradition,” as the Soviet Union’s withdrawal of experts from China led to a shift from a Communist cosmopolitanism to the pursuit of “a self-confidence that could come only from a deep sense of tradition” in China.⁵³

In order to display “a deep sense of tradition,” Sun Xiaoxiang’s 1959 article that summarized the designing of Huagang guanyu addressed the architect’s indebtedness to the canonized late-Ming work of Ji Cheng (計成 1582–1642) on garden construction, The Craft of Gardens (園冶 Yuanye). To be more specific, Sun and his company highlighted a few concepts and techniques that they learned from the book, particularly “borrowing” (借 jie). To reach the goal of “borrowing,” namely, using views from outside, Sun was devoted to taking advantage of West Lake’s scenery beyond Huagang guanyu. Visitors to the Great Lawn in the northern part of the park, for example, could “borrow” the views of picturesque Su Causeway (蘇堤 Sudi), Qixia Ridge (栖霞嶺 Qixia ling), and the Liu Estate.⁵⁴

Although Sun Xiaoxiang traced his philosophy and techniques of landscape archi- tecture back to the Ming dynasty for his design of the Great Lawn, Yu Senwen, the mas- termind behind the revival of Huagang guanyu and Sun’s political patron, later recalled that his insistence on installing a sizable grassland stemmed from experiences in European countries in the 1930s. In 1934, Yu was offered an opportunity to stay in Europe as a representative of a government-affiliated institution. Over the following two years, Yu toured various countries, including Britain, Italy, and France, during which large lawns in England left him with the most profound impression.⁵⁵ In post-1949 China, Yu’s prefer- ence for the vast, British-style meadows was justifiable since the lawn in a public park had long been considered an institution encouraging the public’s participation in political and communal affairs in European countries,⁵⁶ akin to the notion of mass mobilization endorsed by the CCP. It was thus crystal clear that when Yu sought to build a large lawn in this park, what inspired him were his memories and photos of parks in Europe but by no means his reverence for the technique of “borrowing” in Chinese gardening.

The various understandings of the same Great Lawn were a telling example of differ- ing spatial practices of individuals or institutions in this garden. For upper-echelon CCP officials and local planners, this public park was a political space serving pro- paganda purposes in two senses. Domestically, it was a part of a lakeside zone of “recuperation” (休養 xiuyang) that was purported to display class distinctions and redefine work and leisure, that is, the full right of rest for the “laboring people” in a socialist society.⁵⁷ A tour guidebook published in 1956 cited the region west of the lake to offer a marked contrast between pre- and post-1949 China. Before the Communist takeover, the author emphasized, this area had been sliced into pieces by landlords and capitalists, and the Japanese invaders ruthlessly ate up all the fish in the pond. After the Liberation, this region had developed into a district of all sorts of sanatoriums for the working class, the leader in New China. The newly built Huagang guanyu park had been fully integrated into this district.⁵⁸

The right of workers to rest in the scenic sanatoriums had long served as propaganda to display the socialist system’s indisputable advantage over the “old China.” A 1960 report contrasted the hellish lives of the working class before 1949 and their new access to a “heaven”—namely West Lake and the sanatoriums on it.⁵⁹ The park Huagang guanyu was the centerpiece of this heaven, for workers were portrayed as wearing pajamas and casu- ally taking walks in it.⁶⁰ This image of the new, harmonious everyday life in the post-1949 era served the purposes of not only legitimating this new political system domestically but also of exhibiting a prosperous and egalitarian Communist China internationally, as a diplomatic scheme. In August 1961, for example, a delegation led by the Brazilian vice president was guided in a visit to a lakeside sanatorium for Shanghai workers.⁶¹

More often than not, the Huagang guanyu park was designated as a destination for the galaxy of high-profile visitors from abroad, such as President Nixon, President Sukarno (1901–1970) of Indonesia, and Prince Norodom Sihanouk (1922–2012) of Cambodia. This park provided a window through which the outsiders could satisfactorily peep into relatively closed and isolated Maoist China because the park, in Paul Hollander’s words, “had something for everybody,” displaying both “a hard-working, simple, efficient mod- ernizing country” and “thousands of years of Chinese culture”; hence, those scripted and carefully programmed tours were designed to show the CCP’s “attainment of equality and social justice,” something the Soviet Union had failed to achieve.⁶² The existing archival records corroborate Hollander’s observation. In the early 1950s, for example, Sha Wen- han (沙文漢 1908–1964), then governor of Zhejiang Province, called for offering better accommodation and reception services to foreign visitors to augment the latter’s under- standing of “the greatness of China” and to debunk stories about impoverished China by showing off “affluent and peace-loving” China.⁶³ To this end, the CCP authorities usually stage-managed some “unexpected encounters” for such foreign visitors. On September 28, 1962, for example, the first lady of Indonesia, who was walking in the Huagang guanyu park, “happened” to bump into a few “tourists” with various connections with Indonesia, including a Chinese Indonesian student who was going to school in China and a Chinese Indonesian woman who was visiting her family in Hangzhou.⁶⁴

In most cases, the flower, the fish, and the tea were indispensable props for the political tours. In April 1957, for example, Kliment Voroshilov (1881–1969), the chair- man of the Soviet Union, was guided on a tour of the Huagang guanyu park, where he enjoyed the views of exotic goldfish and drank Chinese tea inside the Hall of Green Rain.⁶⁵ Displaying New China in a traditional, if not self-orientalized, way, however, had long been controversial. Yao Wenyuan (1931–2005), the future member of the Gang of Four, commented in 1962 that arrangements of traditional architectural structures and vegetation in public gardens across the country were a manifestation of the tastes of the gentry class in the feudal society.⁶⁶ The radical intellectuals’ antitraditionalist attitude was bolstered by a longstanding political agenda of transforming China’s consumer cities, Hangzhou included, into productive ones.⁶⁷ Under this circumstance, radical Maoists finally proceeded to wipe off the “feudal legacy” of Huagang guanyu in the late 1960s.⁶⁸ Halfway into the Cultural Revolution, hence, the park almost collapsed under the weight of the inherent contradiction in the CCP’s policies—that is, the competing practices of making the park a political space for foreign affairs and transforming it into a site of cash crop production.

The decay and vandalism of this park coincided with a series of setbacks in foreign affairs in the late 1960s when numerous countries severed ties with Beijing. Beginning in the early 1970s, as the PRC government was poised to normalize its relationship with the United States and other Western bloc countries,⁶⁹ the Huagang guanyu park was once again revived as a chief locus for the orchestration of political tourism. As early as 1971, for example, the Hangzhou municipal government began to make preparations for reopen- ing this park to prospective foreign visitors by erecting a new signboard for the park with new, less politically radical text.⁷⁰ The renewed utilization of the park as a political space in the closing years of the Mao era culminated in President Nixon’s visit to this park in February 1972 and the planting of the American president’s gift, three redwood seedlings, inside it as the symbol of the newfound US-China friendship.⁷¹

Although the CCP authorities conceived of the park as a political space, as I have shown, the architect Sun Xiaoxiang took the liberty to proclaim that he harbored an intention to revive China’s cultural tradition. In the early 1950s, when his design was underway, his “revivalism” was well justified because of the Soviet experts’ emphasis on the socialist cosmopolitanism that “denotes the convergence of formerly isolated traditions” in Communist countries.72 In the late 1950s, when Sun provided the national audience a rundown of the design and construction of the park, the ne- cessity to illustrate a “severe difference with the Soviet Union” (thanks to the ongo- ing Sino-Soviet disputes)73 allowed Sun to unashamedly highlight the “traditional” components of the Huagang guanyu park—namely, the flower and the fish—that had been remembered and repeatedly represented for centuries. For writers, scholars, and poets who were conversant with countless literary works related to “Watching Fish at the Flower Harbor,” this newly constructed public park was the very site of their refreshed memories of the flower and the fish. The goldfish continued to be an allusion for composers of traditional poetry after 1949—such as Liu Beiye (柳北野)74 and Wang Tuizhai (王退齋)75—to reiterate a time-honored theme of as- sociating the fish’s joy with a desire to pursue unfettered, Zhuangzi-style individual freedom. Zhou Shoujuan (周瘦鵑 1895–1968), a renowned novelist of popular fic- tion, similarly voiced his aspiration for absolute freedom when he visited the park in 1956.⁷⁶ Even Guo Moruo (1892–1978), widely known for his embrace of socialist culture and collaboration with the authoritarian regime, penned a classical poem in this park in 1959. It illustrated his empathetic feeling for the carefree fish.⁷⁷

The flower was also a much sought-after topic of the cultural elites. One of Liu Beiye’s poems, for example, articulated the poet’s fascination with the peony (牡丹 mudan; specifically, the tree peony), arguably the king of all flowers. Liu cited an essay penned by Su Shi (蘇軾 1037–1101) to justify his passionate love of peonies.⁷⁸ Another old-style poetry master, Zhang Houxun (张厚絢), was fond of lotuses in the pond.⁷⁹ By comparison, Shen Congwen (1902–1988), a preeminent writer in twentieth-century China, was a fan of the park’s chrysanthemums.⁸⁰ By introducing precious breeds of flowers, the architect Sun Xiaoxiang came under criticism for ignoring the needs of the masses.⁸¹ Under this circumstance, Sun apologized in 1959 for falling short of meeting the demands of the masses and having pursued the sole aim of “restoring the historic site of ‘Watching Fish at the Flower Harbor’”—that is, designing a site of memory for like- minded intellectuals.⁸² Sun’s goal could not have been reached without the endorsement of Yu Senwen, the CCP leader and supervisor in Hangzhou. At the height of the Cultural Revolution, Yu was censured as an advocate for cultivating expensive and exotic flowers in all Hangzhou-based gardens.⁸³

Although the rare species of flowers and fish constituted what Peter Carroll calls “sited memory” for the cultural elites,⁸⁴ they took on different significances in the everyday lives of Hangzhou citizens and tourists. Take the peony, the subject of many a poem about this park, for example. Peonies could thrive in the park, with its location in warmer and more humid South China, because of the existence of shading trees.⁸⁵ Hence, it was the shaded areas in this park, particularly the Peony Pavilion, but not the peonies per se, that appealed to the park’s visitors who were intent upon taking walks and resting in a cooler environment. A contributor to the People’s Daily recalled that strolling in those shady zones became a routine when he stayed in a rehabilitation facility nearby.⁸⁶ For Hangzhou denizens, the shaded areas were more popular than the Great Lawn, a scenic spot Yu Senwen felt compelled to build, because of the intolerable sunburn caused by excessive exposure to sunlight that the visitors suffered in the open space of the meadow. Hence, the tourists jok- ingly gave the park—alternatively known as the Western Mountain Park or Xishan gongyuan—an epithet as the “Park with a Western Exposure” (西曬公園 Xishai gongyuan).⁸⁷ For them, the allure of the Great Lawn did not reside in the grass or the technique of “borrowing” that Sun had attempted to popularize but in the nearby Green Rain Hall, a wooden structure for resting and tea consumption. When this teahouse was dismantled in 1960, the lawn’s popularity plummeted immediately.⁸⁸

Aside from being a location to avoid sunburn, the quiet and secluded shaded areas also functioned as places for dating among the young generation. The renowned female writer Chen Xuezhao (陳學昭 1906–1991) once expressed amazement that some of those young men and women who were making their secretive rendezvouses late at night in the park were in their early teens. Her fellow travelers explained that the political campaigns against feudal arranged marriage were inspiring the young generation to choose their partners at an early age.⁸⁹ Considering that the promotion of free-choice love had been a state-initiated movement to display the progressiveness of the socialist system, the youths’ appropriation of this state-sponsored notion and the space of the park—initially planned as a political space in which to perform propaganda functions—to serve their own interests provided an arresting example of how the young generation’s spatial practice deviated from that of the political authorities. In a similar fashion, other teenagers utilized this park to gather shrimp-like plankton or even to steal goldfish directly from the waters.⁹⁰ In this sense, rather than presuming that the state-initiated projects encroached upon the individuals’ everyday lives, I argue that those projects, though they played a constitutive role in the PRC’s state propaganda apparatus, allowed for the making of a new type of everyday life under socialism, one in which individuals negotiated with and appropriated the official rhetoric and practices to reap their own benefits.

This everyday life differed from the imaginary world of CCP cadres in which the young men and women were by no means pleasure-seekers and loafers but active participants in group/political activities in the park. In a 1959 essay purporting to establish a national reputation for the Huagang guanyu park, for example, Zhejiang’s provincial governor presented to the national audience an image of boys and girls either sitting together to sing songs or frolicking on the lawn.⁹¹ Hence, the youth was conceived of as the embodiment of a young and vibrant republic. In many prear- ranged visits to the park by foreign visitors, children were indispensable populace actors, who symbolized the Chinese people’s character: working hard and loving their lives. During Prince Norodom Sihanouk’s visit to this park in December 1960, for example, he was greeted by a group of children who “happened” to bring musical instruments to hold a gathering on the Great Lawn. The amused Cambodian prince thus performed dances amid the children’s laughter and applause.⁹²

The CCP leaders’ use of the Great Lawn as a political space notwithstanding, its designer, Sun Xiaoxiang, harbored a different intention, as I have shown. Although the lawn in a park as a landscape architectural practice—essentially a Victorian gardening style in Britain—initially emerged in China in public gardens designed and owned by foreigners,⁹³ Sun managed to Sinicize it, as the vastly open space of the Great Lawn af- forded him the opportunity to practice “borrowing,” a time-honored gardening technique of imperial China. Hence, the lawn functioned as a discursive space using which Sun made a firm connection between the gardening discourses of late imperial times and the political situation in Mao’s China. Deep down in his mind, however, Sun was intent upon advancing an agenda of restoring the ancient relic of Huagang guanyu rather than of prof- fering public services of indoctrination and mobilization of the masses, as envisioned by the political authorities.⁹⁴ Given Sun’s training in Chinese painting, such an understanding was consistent with his awareness of the capacity of beasts, birds, fish, and vegetation in Chinese paintings to inform and inspire landscape design in China.⁹⁵ As shown above, Sun’s priority afforded the intellectuals, writers, and poets the luxury of revisiting the allusions to flowers and fish that had been reiterated for millennia.

The spatial practice of the ordinary citizens of Hangzhou or visitors in their day- to-day lives differed from those of the CCP leaders and the architect. To them, the Great Lawn was a space for strolling, drinking tea, enjoying the lake view, and engaging in outdoor activities. Their spatial practice also included their deliberate avoidance of this space or keeping themselves away from direct sun or seeking a place for a tryst in the shade. It was the disparity among the spatial practices of the political authorities, the cultural elites (including the architect), and the everyday visitors/tourists that during the Cultural Revolution prompted radical Maoists to hurl charges against the “revisionists” who had transformed Hangzhou-based parks into nothing but a locus of “resting for se- niors, dating for the youngsters, and playing for children” and had ignored those parks’ “considerable political significance.”⁹⁶

Throughout this article, I have shown how a politicized location multiplied into politi- cal, mnemonic, and experiential spaces. Although I have underscored that different actors took the liberty to make and use the Huagang guanyu park in their own ways, the three spaces were by no means mutually exclusive. As I have shown, the fish, the vital element of the “Watching Fish at the Flower Harbor” park, allowed the writers, scholars, and poets to express a yearning for freedom à la Zhuangzi, whereas it was the trophy of poaching for children from nearby neighborhoods in their day-to-day lives. The same fish functioned as a vital prop in the political realm, for its exotic- ness continually fascinated foreign visitors to the park, including President Nixon, who made a world-famous statement: “I never saw goldfish that large.”⁹⁷ The fish became a nodal point where the three spaces intersected with one another. It is thus fair to argue that the CCP-initiated and -led political and propaganda programs gave rise to novel aesthetic and lived experiences and were thereby conducive to making a new type of everyday life in socialism.

My emphasis on the intertwining of the political/propaganda and the experiential/ everyday uses of the park wrestles with two trends in the study of everyday life in the socialist world. On the one hand, everyday life took on special significance because it was the very locus at which the party’s ideological power was “naturalized” and thereby became legible to the general population.⁹⁸ On the other hand, it provided an arena where individuals at the grassroots level staged their resistance to state domination.⁹⁹ In contrast, the present article downplays the opposition between the interventionist party-state and a resistant population at the local level. Hence, I contend that the political, the discursive, and the personal could be mutually constitutive, and their intermingling, interaction, and intertwining were the very essence of the day-to-day situations of Mao’s China.

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2、Chang-tai Hung, Mao’s New World: Political Culture in the Early People’s Republic (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), 8–19.

3、Peter Kenez, The Birth of the Propaganda State: Soviet Methods of Mass Mobilization, 1917–1929

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 8.

4、For example, Shuishan Yu showed how architects used architectural space to preach socialist nationalism. Shuishan Yu, Chang’an Avenue and the Modernization of Chinese Architecture (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012), 57. Tsung-yi Pan argued that in the PRC state-sponsored com- memorative architecture and practices at Tiananmen Square materialized the CCP’s memory of national salvation and revolutionary tradition. Tsung-yi Pan, “Constructing Tiananmen Square as a Realm of Memory: National Salvation, Revolutionary Tradition, and Political Modernity in Twentieth-Century China” (PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 2011). See also Yan Li, China’s Soviet Dream: Propaganda, Culture, and Popular Imagination (London: Routledge, 2018), 91–108.

5、James Z. Gao, The Communist Takeover of Hangzhou: The Transformation of City and Cadre, 1949–1954 (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2004), 218.

6、Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 117.

7、Jeremy Brown, “Moving Targets: Changing Class Labels in Rural Hebei and Henan, 1960–1979,” in Jeremy Brown and Matthew D. Johnson, eds., Maoism at the Grassroots: Everyday Life in China’s Era of High Socialism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 381n4.

8、Gao, Communist Takeover of Hangzhou, 5.

9、Hung Wu, Remaking Beijing: Tiananmen Square and the Creation of a Political Space (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 9.

10、Peter Hayden, Russian Parks and Gardens (London: Frances Lincoln, 2005), 231.

11、Denise Y. Ho, Curating Revolution: Politics on Display in Mao’s China (Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press, 2018), 13.

12、Paul Hollander, Political Pilgrims: Travels of Western Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba, 1928–1978 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 17.

13、Scholars have long found that the CCP had to negotiate and compromise with specialists of various fields to advance its social and economic agendas in Mao’s China. For example, Dwight H. Perkins, Market Control and Planning in Communist China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966), 3; Eddy U, Disorganizing China: Counter-bureaucracy and the Decline of Socialism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 59.

14、Ho, Curating Revolution, 214.

15、Zhongguo jianzhu wenhua zhongxin, Zhongwai jingguan [Landscape in China and abroad] (Nanjing: Jiangsu renmin chubanshe, 2011), 35.

16、Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, vol. 1, Conflicts and Divisions, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 1. Lee Hui-shu argued that West Lake had become a “site of memory” immediately after the Song dynasty collapsed. Li Huishu [Lee Hui-shu], “Xihu qingqu tu yu Lin’an shengjing tuxiang de zaixian” [The painting of refreshing taste of West Lake and the representation of Lin’an’s spectacular scenery], in Li Song, ed., “Songdai de shijue jingxiang yu lishi qingjing” huiyi shilu [A veritable record of the “conference of the visual imagery and historical context of the Song dynasty”] (Guilin: Guangxi shifan daxue chubanshe, 2017), 184.

17、Peter J. Carroll, Between Heaven and Modernity: Reconstructing Suzhou, 1895–1937 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 15.

18、Perry Link, The Use of Literature: Life in the Socialist Chinese Literary System (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 285.

19、Robert Rotenberg, Landscape and Power in Vienna (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 4.

20、De Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 117.

21、 W. J. T. Mitchell, “Introduction,” in W. J. T. Mitchell, ed., Landscape and Power, 2nd. ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 1–12.

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23、De Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 115.

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25、Tian Rucheng, “Xihu youlan zhi” [Tourist guide to West Lake], in Wang Guoping, ed., Xihu wenxian jicheng di 3 ce, Mingdai shizhi Xihu wenxian zhuanji [Collection of literature about West Lake, book 3, special issue on literature about West Lake in histories and gazetteers of the Ming dynasty] (Hangzhou: Hangzhou chubanshe, 2004), 47.

26、Song Fansheng, “Huagang guanyu zonghengtan” [Full remarks on Watching Fish at the Flower Harbor], Zhongguo yuanlin [Journal of Chinese Landscape Architecture] 9, no. 4 (1993): 28.

27、Li Wei et al., Xihu zhi [Chronicle of West Lake] (Taipei: Chengwen chubanshe youxiangongsi, 1983), 234.

28、Shen Deqian, Xihu zhizuan [Compiled gazetteer of West Lake] (Taipei: Wenhai chubanshe, 1971), 150.

29、Hu Xuwei, “Huagang guanyu gongyuan” [The public park Watching Fish at the Flower Har- bor], in Hangzhou shi yuanlin wenwu guanliju, ed., Xihu fengjing yuanlin (1949–1989) [Landscape and gardening in West Lake, 1949–1989] (Shanghai: Shanghai kexue jishu chubanshe, 1990), 77.

30、Li Naiwen, Hangzhou tonglan [A general guide to Hangzhou] (Shanghai: Zhongguo wenhua chubanshe, 1948), 27.

31、Gao, Communist Takeover of Hangzhou, 218.

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33、Hung, Mao’s New World, 263.

34、Hu, “Huagang guanyu gongyuan,” 78.

35、“Hangzhou shi yuanlin jianshe gongzuo baogao (1949–1955) (jielu)” [Work report on landscape constructions in Hangzhou (1949–1955) (excerpt)], in Wang Guoping, Xihu wenxian jicheng di 12 ce, 172–73.

36、“Xihu fengjing jianshe wunian jihua” [A five-year plan of landscape construction in West Lake], in Wang Guoping, Xihu wenxian jicheng di 12 ce, 84–91.

37、“Guanyu Xihu fengjing zhengjian gongzuo jihua de baogao” [A report on refashioning West Lake’s landscapes], in Wang Guoping, Xihu wenxian jicheng di 12 ce, 262.

38、Fu Shulan, Hangzhou fengjing chengshi de xingcheng shi: Xihu yu chengshi xingtai guanxi yanjin guocheng yanjiu [History of the making of Hangzhou as a landscape city: a study of the develop- mental process of the morphological relation between West Lake and the city] (Nanjing: Dongnan daxue chubanshe, 2015), 105–24.

39、Shi Diandong, Xihu zhi [Chronicle of West Lake] (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1995), 160–61.

40、Wu Zigang, Tan Boyu, Yao Yuqiu, and Wang Shounian, “Xihu ji huanhu diqu de bianqian he gongyuan lüdi de kaituo” [The transformations and the opening of public parks in West Lake and the lakeside areas], in Hangzhou shi yuanlin wenwu guanliju, ed., Xihu fengjing yuanlin (1949–1989) [Landscape and gardening in West Lake, 1949–1989] (Shanghai: Shanghai kexue jishu chubanshe, 1990), 77.

41、Huang Shang, Shanchuan, lishi, renwu [Mountains, history, and figures] (Hong Kong: Shenghuo, dushu, xinzhi sanlian shudian, 1981), 42.

42、Wu et al., “Xihu ji huanhu diqu de bianqian he gongyuan lüdi de kaituo,” 77.

43、Wu et al., “Xihu ji huanhu diqu de bianqian he gongyuan lüdi de kaituo.”

44、Shi Diandong, Shijie mingyuan shengjing 1 Yingguo, Aierlan [Famous gardens and scenic spots in the world, book 1: UK and Ireland] (Hangzhou: Zhejiang sheying chubanshe, 2014), 5.

45、Meng Zhaozhen and Chen Xiaoli, Zhongguo fengjing yuanlin mingjia [Masters of landscape architecture in China] (Beijing: Zhongguo jianzhu gongye chubanshe, 2010), 191.

46、Meng and Chen, Zhongguo fengjing yuanlin mingjia, 196.

47、Huang, Shanchuan, lishi, renwu, 42.

48、For example, Sun Xiaoxiang, Yuanlin yishu yu yuanlin sheji [Landscaping arts and landscape architecture] (Beijing: Zhongguo jianzhu gongye chubanshe, 2011), 3.

49、 Kenez, The Birth of the Propaganda State, 255. See also Eric Naiman, “Introduction,” in Evgeny Dorbrenko and Eric Naiman, eds., The Landscape of Stalinism: The Art and Ideology of Soviet Space (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003), xii.

50、Here, I gain insight from the Nazi experience. Frank Uekoetter argues that conservationists in Nazi Germany were surprisingly free in expressing their opinions on conservation because “it was difficult, if not impossible, to deduce an authoritative conservation ethic from the key pillars of Nazi ideology.” See Frank Uekoetter, The Green and the Brown: A History of Conservation in Nazi Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 10.

51、Sun and Hu, “Hangzhou Huagang guanyu gongyuan guihua sheji,” 19.

52、 Zhao Jijun, Zhongguo xiandai yuanlin lishi yu lilun yanjiu [Studies on gardening history and theory in modern China] (Nanjing: Dongnan daxue chubanshe, 2014), 49.

53、Jiwei Ci, Dialectic of the Chinese Revolution: From Utopianism to Hedonism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 41.

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55、Yu Senwen, “Yu Senwen huiyi lu” [Yu Senwen’s memoir], in Zhengxie Hangzhou shi weiyuan- hui wenshi wei, ed., Hangzhou wenshi ziliao [Literary and historical materials of Hangzhou], vol. 20 (n.p.: 1998), 73–88.

56、Zhou Xiangpin and Chen Zhehua, Shanghai gongyuan sheji shilue [Brief history of park design in Shanghai] (Shanghai: Tongji daxue chubanshe, 2009), 38.

57、Sun, Yuanlin yishu yu yuanlin sheji, 3.

58、Ren Weiyin, Meili de Xihu [The beautiful West Lake] (Shanghai: Shanghai wenhua chubanshe, 1956), 24–25.

59、 “Shanghai shi jianzhu gonghui jianzhu gongcheng ju gongzuo weiyuanhui guanyu zuzhi zhigong fu Hanghzou xiuyang de qingkuang de cailiao” [Materials regarding organizing employees to go to Hangzhou for recuperation by the Shanghai construction workers’ union and the work committee of the department of construction], p. 41, B119-2-629, Shanghai Municipal Archives.

60、Xihu shengji [Famous historical sites of West Lake] (Hangzhou: Zhejiang renmin chubanshe, 1955), 63.

61、Shi, Xihu zhi, 125.

62、Hollander, Political Pilgrims, 287.

63、Huadong shifan daxue Zhongguo dangdaishi yanjiu zhongxin, Zhongguo dangdai minjian shiliao jikan 11 Sha Wenhan gongzuo biji 1949–1954 nian [Collected works of nongovernmental historical materials in contemporary China, no. 11, Sha Wenhan’s work journal, 1949–1954] (Shanghai: Shanghai dongfang chuban zhongxin, 2015), 440.

64、“Hadini Sujianuo furen daoda Hangzhou, Zhejiang sheng shengzhang Zhou Jianren he furen huanyan yindunixiya guibin” [Madam Hartini Sukarno arrives in Hangzhou, and Zhou Jianren, Zhejiang’s provincial governor, and his wife hold a banquet for the honorable Indonesian guests], Renmin ribao, September 29, 1962.

65、“Fulao maoyu manyou Xihu mingsheng, wanjian guankan Gai Jiaotian mingju ‘Ehu cun’” [Voroshilov tours scenic spots at West Lake in the rain, and watches Gai Jiaotian’s famous operatic play, Village of Evil Tiger, at night], Renmin ribao, April 28, 1957.

66、“Mao Zedong he zhongyang shouzhang tan yuanlin lühua wenti” [Mao Zedong and leading cadres of the center on issues of gardening and greening], Yuanlin gemin, no. 5 (January 1968): 1.

67、Gao, Communist Takeover of Hangzhou, 107.

68、Wu et al., “Xihu ji huanhu diqu de bianqian he gongyuan lüdi de kaituo,” 70.

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70、 “Hangzhou Xihu fengjing mingsheng jieshao” [Guide to scenic spots at West Lake of Hangzhou],

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71、Shi, Xihu zhi, 115.

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77、Wu Xiansong, Xihu fengjingqu mingsheng bolan [A broad view of scenic spots of West Lake] (Hangzhou: Hangzhou chubanshe, 2000), 110.

78、Liu, Jiecanglou shichao, 155.

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82、Sun and Hu, “Hangzhou Huagang guanyu gongyuan guihua sheji,” 24.

83、 “Zhanduan Tao Zhu shenjin zhiwuyuan de heishou” [Cutting off the evil talon Tao Zhu stretches out to the botanical garden], Yuanlin gemin, no. 5 (January 1968): 9.

84、Carroll, Between Heaven and Modernity, 15.

85、Yu Heng, Caozhou mudan [Peony in Caozhou] (Jinan: Shandong renmin chubanshe, 1959), 72.

86、Yu Min, “Xihu jijing” [The scene of West Lake], Renmin ribao, September 10, 1961.

87、“Hangzhou shi yuanlin jianshe gongzuo baogao (1949–1955) (jielu),” 175.

88、Wu et al., “Xihu ji huanhu diqu de bianqian he gongyuan lüdi de kaituo,” 70–71.

89、Yequ, “Yeyou yougan, xiangcun zaji” [Thoughts occurring to me during a night out, miscel- laneous notes on the countryside], Renmin ribao, October 23, 1956.

90、 Wang Xufeng, Huagang guanyu [Watching fish at the flower harbor], Zhongguo zuojia, no.

9 (2001): 168–69.

91、Zhou Jianren, “Hangzhou fengwu” [Sceneries in Hangzhou], Renmin ribao, August 20, 1959.

92、“Zhejiang sheng shengzhang Zhou Jianren juxing yanhui, huanying Xihanuke qinwang deng guibingbin” [Zhou Jianren, provincial governor of Zhejiang, held a banquet to greet honored guests, Prince Norodom Sihanouk and his company], Renmin ribao, December 23, 1960.

93、Zhou and Chen, Shanghai gongyuan sheji shilue, 38.

94、Sun and Hu, “Hangzhou Huagang guanyu gongyuan guihua sheji,” 24.

95、Wang Shaozeng, Lin Guangsi, and Liu Zhisheng, “Guji gengyun, momo fengxian—Sun Xiaoxiang jiaoshou dui ‘fengjing yuanlin yu dadi guihua sheji xueke’ de juda gongxian jiqi shenyuan yingxiang” [Solitary cultivation and silent dedication—Prof. Sun Xiaoxiang’s great contribution to the subject of landscape architecture and its profound influence], Zhongguo yuanlin, no. 23 (December 2007): 28.

96、“Hangzhou Xihu fengjing mingsheng jieshao,” 59.

97、 “Nixon and Chou Stroll and Go Boating in Hangchow,” New York Times, February 27, 1972.

98、Christina Kiaer and Eric Naiman, “Introduction,” in Christina Kiaer and Eric Naiman, eds., Everyday Life in Early Soviet Russia: Taking the Revolution Inside (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 2–6.

99、Jeremy Brown and Matthew D. Johnson, “Introduction,” in Maoism at the Grassroots, 2; Brown, “Moving Targets,” 381n4.