From liberating production to unleashing consumption: Mapping landscapes of power in Beijing

This article offers an analysis of two locales in downtown Beijing nominally set aside for public use, Tiananmen Square and The Place, as successively linked landscapes of power that define the shifting and relations between market and place negotiated by the Chinese Communist Party-state over time. However, whereas Zukin (1993) argues that such landscapes lack coherent values because of their subordination to capitalism’s haphazard process of “creative destruction,” a salient feature of Beijing’s shifting landscapes of power is the authoritarian Party-state’s persistent mediation of market relations, and its subordination of the contradictions between market and place to the changing needs of the regime under market reform. Despite their apparent differences in intent and design, the shopping mall has eclipsed the public square as a key urban site through which the Party-state seeks to build a self-conscious and cohesive socioeconomic class of subjects over which and for which it seeks to rule.