Lisa Safford - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Lisa Safford

ASIANetwork Exchange: A Journal for Asian Studies in the Liberal Arts, 2014

CHANGING SPACES If it is possible for a city to remake itself in ten short years, Beijing, motiva... more CHANGING SPACES If it is possible for a city to remake itself in ten short years, Beijing, motivated by its international coming-of-age event, the 2008 Olympics, has impressively done so. 1 Beijing's old airport, which in 2000 resembled 1940s Casablanca, has now been replaced by a soaring, airy, and immense modern structure (fig. 1), the biggest construction site in the world in 2007, employing 50,000 workers (Heathcote 2007). Where once there was crumbling infrastructure, infrequently-encountered and rundown twenty-or thirty-year old vehicles, drab tumbledown architecture, absent street lights (making a night stroll on crowded urban streets a decade ago eerily dark), and grey dirt and weeds are now wide boulevards swarming with late model cars, ultra-modern bridges and subways, glass and neon-faced skyscrapers, and grassy lawns bounded by neatly trimmed hedges-all at a cost of over 40 billion dollars (Gross 2010). Yet, experts say, everything in China is a trade-off, which is immediately evident when one approaches the airport runway. The city is shrouded by so much smog that little can be seen even a half mile off-no buildings, vistas, or sun. While the environmental impact is of crucial importance, my focus in this paper is upon another form of trade-off: the degradation of historic China. 2 The new China is a marvel to behold, but is the cost of modernization to be the forsaking of China's traditional culture? Recent travel in China a dozen years after my first visit in 1998 gave me opportunities to meet with representatives from media, education, and government and ask: how well has China maintained its cultural heritage in the face of rapid modernization? 3 And how important is it for citizens and government to do so? These questions additionally raise thornier questions, beyond the scope of this paper, concerning the nature of cultural heritage: how should it be defined, and what should be preserved? 4 Who should decide-govern

Japan Studies Association Journal, 2010

East West Connections, 2004

Pedagogy Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature Language Composition and Culture, 2013

ASIANetwork Exchange: A Journal for Asian Studies in the Liberal Arts, 2014

CHANGING SPACES If it is possible for a city to remake itself in ten short years, Beijing, motiva... more CHANGING SPACES If it is possible for a city to remake itself in ten short years, Beijing, motivated by its international coming-of-age event, the 2008 Olympics, has impressively done so. 1 Beijing's old airport, which in 2000 resembled 1940s Casablanca, has now been replaced by a soaring, airy, and immense modern structure (fig. 1), the biggest construction site in the world in 2007, employing 50,000 workers (Heathcote 2007). Where once there was crumbling infrastructure, infrequently-encountered and rundown twenty-or thirty-year old vehicles, drab tumbledown architecture, absent street lights (making a night stroll on crowded urban streets a decade ago eerily dark), and grey dirt and weeds are now wide boulevards swarming with late model cars, ultra-modern bridges and subways, glass and neon-faced skyscrapers, and grassy lawns bounded by neatly trimmed hedges-all at a cost of over 40 billion dollars (Gross 2010). Yet, experts say, everything in China is a trade-off, which is immediately evident when one approaches the airport runway. The city is shrouded by so much smog that little can be seen even a half mile off-no buildings, vistas, or sun. While the environmental impact is of crucial importance, my focus in this paper is upon another form of trade-off: the degradation of historic China. 2 The new China is a marvel to behold, but is the cost of modernization to be the forsaking of China's traditional culture? Recent travel in China a dozen years after my first visit in 1998 gave me opportunities to meet with representatives from media, education, and government and ask: how well has China maintained its cultural heritage in the face of rapid modernization? 3 And how important is it for citizens and government to do so? These questions additionally raise thornier questions, beyond the scope of this paper, concerning the nature of cultural heritage: how should it be defined, and what should be preserved? 4 Who should decide-govern

Japan Studies Association Journal, 2010

East West Connections, 2004

Pedagogy Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature Language Composition and Culture, 2013