The World as Theme Park

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OC Issue 3: Reality

The World as Theme Park

by Ian Fong

The Beijing World Park: Travel ‘the World’ in One Day

The Beijing World Park (hereafter, “The World Park”) is a popular theme park that opened in

1993 and exhibits a collection of worldwide architectural icons in miniature.1 It is estimated thatit receives 1.5 millions visitors each year. The park’s slogan is “Walking around the worldwithout leaving Beijing.” The ideological implications of this slogan are far reaching. Togetherthey combine to render Beijing’s urban space and social development as spectacle—simplified, homogenous, and totalitarian. Brochures and websites targeting tourists describe the Beijing World Park as a place where youcan “travel the world in one day”:

The World Park in Beijing displays about 100 tourist attractions in a scaled-down version fromnearly 50 countries around the world including the Tower Bridge in London, the Eiffel tower inParis, pyramids in Egypt, as well as the Twin Towers in New York, which were destroyed onSeptember 11, 2001. …The layout is modeled after the five continents and four oceans,incorporating different spectacles and folklore of the world. Most of the architectural structuresare built from marble, some with exquisite carvings. These reproductions are vivid. Of China’stheme parks, the Beijing World Park is outstanding in terms of its exquisite architecture, rich andcolorful activities and cultural atmosphere. Visitors can travel the world in one day.2

The World Park, this essay will argue, is a piece of architectural collage—a montage thatmisrepresents Beijing in cultural and anthropological terms, but reflects certain aspects of thepolitical and economic desires of hegemonic, authoritarian class in contemporary Beijing.Images of Beijing as a ‘world city’—a leader in the global capitalist sphere—are made‘abstractly concrete’ by means of carefully staged architectural spectacles. This essayborrows from Guy Debord’s cultural and political analysis of late capitalism and is deeplyindebted to his idea that we now live in “the society of the spectacle” meaning a period ofcapitalist development in which “all that was once lived has moved into representation.”Baudrillard says that Disneyland is needed to make us believe that there is still a real world

outside.3 The World Park performs the opposite function in Beijing’s emerging transformationinto the quintessential postmodern city.

The architecture on display at The World Park exhibits a “disjointed character.”4 Buildings are

collected in their “separateness.”5 The isolated miniature landmarks of The World Park areplaces for quick, discontinuous consumption. In other words, The World Park is not an“anthropological place”; it is “a non-place” which “cannot be defined as relational, or

historical, or concerned with identity.”6 Walking through The World Park the visitor behaves likeKublai Khan in Calvino’s novel, Invisible Cities, who thinks that he does not need to leave hispalace and can conquer the world. The “I” is not in the world, but above the world. Thelandmarks in The World Park only serve as the background in a spectacular photo intended tovalidate the tourist.7 The connection between all the landmarks in World Park consists of blankspace. The World Park is ruinous not because it hasn’t been finished but because each

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landmark exists as an unrelated fragment without connection to any other. The question ofbeing is not taken up in the representations exhibited in The World Park; the question of havingis not criticized; only appearing is valued. As a consequence, the existence of what isconcretely made (architecture) is reduced to a spectacle evacuated of context.

The word “spectacle” has a number of connotations. It carries the implication of economicspeculation. It also implies a philosophic view of the world whereby action and activity areknown and understood by means of visual categories. As Guy Debord explains in Society ofthe Spectacle:

The first stage of the economy’s domination of social life brought about an evidentdegradation of being into having—human fulfillment was no longer equated with what onewas, but with what one possessed. The present stage, in which social life has becomecompletely dominated by the accumulated productions of the economy, is bringing about ageneral shift from having to appearing all ‘having’ must now derive its immediate prestigeand its ultimate purpose from appearances.8

Visitors to The World Park are merely dislocated “users,” not “inhabitants”9 whoserelationships with a place are nurtured through “habit.” Speed destroys the formation ofhabit, and hence, the rhythm of a living place constituted by the heterogeneous “interaction

between a place, a time and an expenditure of energy.”10 Tactile urban experience through‘habit’, in Walter Benjamin’s phrasing, is lacking from the World Park. Benjamin writes,

Buildings are received in a twofold manner: by use and by perception. Or, better: tactilely andoptically. Such reception cannot be understood in terms of the concentrated attention of atraveler before a famous building. On the tactile side, there is no counterpart to whatcontemplation is on the optical side. Tactile reception comes about not so much by way ofattention as by way of habit. The latter largely determines even the optical reception ofarchitecture, which spontaneously takes the form of casual noticing, rather than attentiveobservation.11

Using Debord to read Derrida’s reading of Marx’s fetishism, the spectacle, not thecommodity, haunts the fake landmarks in the World Park. In Derrida’s reading of Marx’s

concept of commodity fetishism,12 “[t]he commodity … haunts the thing, its specter is at work

in use-value.”13 Exchange value is abstract, invisible, and non-sensuous; it cannot exist on its

own. Although the thing is haunted, it is neither dead nor alive.14 The thing is living dead. Thecommodity needs the object’s survival so that exchange value takes its “shape” andfunction. The haunting comes from the experience of seeing what one does not see and

touching what one does not touch.15 A commodity’s life is a vampire’s life. Derrida remindsus of the fact that restoration of the use value can only be seen as an ontological attempt that

to Derrida, is “a conjuration,” “a hauntology.”16 We are not informed the existence of theuse value before the existence of the market. Using Debord to read Derrida’s reading ofMarx’s fetishism, the spectacle, not the commodity, haunts the fake landmarks in “TheWorld.” Depending upon the abstract spectacle, their concrete existence is less than a

thing.17 The fake landmarks are devoid of use value at the very beginning.

Beijing: A ‘World Class’ City or ‘The World’ in one City?

The city of Beijing itself has been depicted in advertisements in ways that echo the notion of‘traveling around the world in one day’. Sun Dong An Plaza, a 120,000 sq. m shopping malland office building in Beijing, is projected in one advertisement as comparable to Ginza(Tokyo), Manhattan (New York) and Canary Wharf (London). In another advertisement, the

claim is made: “We Have in Beijing What They Have in New York.”18 It is as if the simple act of“cut and paste” is enough to turn Beijing not just into a ‘global city’, but a representation

or simulacra of the globe itself.19 The built environment in Beijing, a city that is undergoingsimultaneous construction and destruction due to its embrace of key economic andideological tenets of neo-liberalism, aspires to achieve what The World Park does as a



collection of architectural landmarks. The World Park is a visual and concrete embodiment ofthe embrace of neo-liberalism by the newest and most dramatically growing economy of thetwenty-first century. The World Park is but one aspect of a broader ideological project to renderthe creative destruction of neo-liberalism ‘natural’. Visitors are invited to ‘travel the world inone day’ in a city that is, literally, being wrenched apart by the forces of neo-liberalism.

As Anthony D. King and Abidin Kusno explain in their article on ‘Globalization and the Makingof Transnational Space in China’:

Huge swaths of Beijing are being cleared by real-estate developers to make way for high-riseapartments, office buildings, and shopping centers. The familiar syndrome of urban renewal isdrastically changing the face of an ancient city within a few years. Within a few years around90 percent of the old neighborhood will be cleared.

Walter Benjamin’s description of nineteenth-century Paris can help us read twenty-first-century Beijing. Benjamin wrote, “With the upheaval of the market economy, we begin to

recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled.”20

The transformation of architecture in Beijing, the capital under the totalitarian project of“socialism with Chinese characters,” can be compared to that of New York in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, when 306 skyscrapers, spectacles that served as a

national symbol of modernity, were built in a period of less than two decades (1890-1908).21

Chinese communism appears to be the only order capable of saving capitalism after the

world financial crisis.22 The dictatorship of neoliberalism is reproduced in caricatured and

heightened form in “socialist” China.23 This is what Albert J. Bergesen terms ‘the BeijingConsensus’. To read all this in another way round, the communist dictatorship, acting as apolitical engineer, appropriates economics to cement its political power. Thus, no reading ofthe World Park’s architecture can be complete absent consideration of what is happening inBeijing’s actual architectural productions. The World Park is not the only architecturallandmark in the city of Beijing that constitutes a spectacle. Beijing has been called a

“museum”24 and “a virtual gallery of architecture.”25 The headquarters of The People’sDaily News, for example, is seen by many as an example of how the autocratic regime usesarchitecture in an exhibitionist manner to display its phallic sexual potency. (Fig. 1)

Fig 1. Standing adjacent to the CCTV Headquarters, People’s Daily news headquarters is under

construction.26

Politics becomes pornographic and prudishly sacred performing “a bottomless show” of itsown spectacular nature. While the exhibitionist is waiting for worldwide recognition, the sign ofthe potency of such recognition has to be shown at a respectable distance.

As is the case everywhere, in Beijing architecture expresses the unconscious of a city. Theheight of Manhattan’s towers, according to Le Corbusier, was “nothing more than the

manifestation of an inferiority complex.”27 Georges Bataille cites architecture as the source ofrepressive social order, arguing: “It is in the form of cathedral and palace that Church or State

speaks to the multitudes and imposes silence upon them.”28 Global capitalists make use of



the political situation to make money; global architects become tools of the ideologicalapparatus of political engineering. Together they accelerate the cruelty of both a totalitarian

regime and global capitalism.29

The CCTV Headquarters: A ‘Global’ City Within a Single Building

Daniel Solomon elegantly captures the state of contemporary Beijing when he writes:

Imagine a situation in which 97 percent of the residential fabric of New York and Chicagoincluding the most vibrant neighborhoods were demolished in ten years and the population isforcibly relocated to sterile new suburbs through a massively corrupt system of expropriation. …Without any exaggeration, that is exactly what is happening in Shanghai and Beijing today.30

Solomon was writing specifically about the China Central Television Headquarters, a massivepostmodern structure built to house 10,000 CCTV workers, designed by famed Dutch architectand Harvard Professor, Rem Koolhaas. The design of the CCTV building echoes the ideology ofa ‘world within a city’ that animates The World Park at the same time that it unabashedlycelebrates the onslaught of neo-liberalism in contemporary China.

Fig. 2 The CCTV Headquarters. Photograph by OMA31

“The Chinese”, Koolhaas has said, “love monumental ambition.”32 The CCTV Headquartersseems to broadcast to American architects that their architectural dreams can be betterfulfilled in contemporary Beijing under communist dictatorship than in New York. (Fig 2 & 3 ) Themodernity that can be seen in New York is better represented in Beijing. Architects after 9/11

are welcome in China33 to continue the dream of creating the ‘generic’ city.34 The CCTVHeadquarters are but one example of how Beijing not only follows the architectural codes of

American capitalism, but also employs American architectural firms and design practices.35

The spatial design of traditional Chinese buildings is horizontal with an emphasis on harmony

with the landscape.36 To be connected globally, however, requires making the buildings ashigh as possible. Such global connection in a vertical way results in local disconnection.



Fig. 3 A picture taken during the construction of the CCTV Headquarters. Photograph by OMA.37

In the tour around the CCTV Headquarters, public access to the building is limited to whatKoolhaas calls “the loop”: a sequence of exhibition spaces, restaurants, and viewing areas

that climb up one tower, cross the bridge and descend the other.38 The tour cannot get to anycenter. It cannot be trespassed upon or transgressed. The CCTV Headquarters is like the CCTVcorporation itself, monitoring Beijing day and night; controlling media and exhibitingsovereignty. The CCTV Headquarters, as a monument to state controlled broadcasting, is a

symbol and an instrument of oppression.39 A modern city with “Chinese characters” is a city

under totalitarian control. The building's “beauty” is barbaric.40 Its “brightness”overshadows its neighourhood. With increasing numbers of such hyper-buildings beingerected, ordinary buildings are buried; and the connection between hyper-buildings becomesempty, sterile space like that we see in The World Park. The CCTV Headquarters, like The WorldPark, can be seen as a product of post-urbanism that frees architecture from context. Itpromotes a kind of thought that separates the individual walking through Beijing from anygiven context. But walking in the society of spectacle with “Chinese characters”unconsciously implants the walker with the ideology that permeates everyday life in China:economic progress is the only end in life and the source of all value and only China’stotalitarian regime can create and guide such progress.

Beijing becomes familiar and not familiar at the same time. She becomes an uncanny city likethe one depicted in Peter Margonelli’s “Invisible Geographies: The District” (2007) below

(fig.5):41



Fig. 5. Peter Margonelli, Invisible Geographies: The District, 2007.42

Beijing is the copy of other world cities. Worldwide brands can be bought in Beijing. “Walkingaround the world without leaving Beijing” is “fulfilled.” The CCTV Headquarters appears as

“a pornographic image of a naked woman on her hands and knees.”43 It seems to conveya message that Beijing is begging for western “penetration.” China is a dictator and, at thesame time, a prostitute. The CCTV Headquarters is a spectacular presence of Chinese

sovereignty and pornographic joke.44 She cannot be the transcendental signifier withoutbeing a prostitute, and vice versa.

Koolhaas’ description of the relationship between skyscrapers and cities echoes the ideologythat animates the CCTV Headquarters. A skyscraper can be placed in any block and is “a city

within a city.”45 Its “[b]igness no longer needs the city,” and it “represents the city; it

preempts the city; or better still, it is the city.”46 Each New York skyscraper competes withevery other through the medium of the Manhattan Grid. By contrast there is no competition,

only cooptation in Beijing.47

The CCTV headquarters, which expresses China’s “monumental ambition,” is part ofongoing economic processes, which have devastated Old Beijing’s interconnected

neighborhoods developed in the hutongs. The CCTV Headquarters, a hyper-building,48 aims at

serving as a globally recognized signifier of modernity.49 Twentieth-first century Beijing is nowbroadcasting to the world through this architectural spectacle that the contemporary melting

pot is now Beijing. It is constructed as a “transnational space.”50

In 1978 Koolhaas published Delirious New York, which has since become an iconic text. Thebook depicts New York as a metaphor for the incredible variety of human behavior and anepicenter for the “culture of congestion.” New York, for Koolhaas, is surreal and delirious.

What Koolhaas calls “the congestion of skyscrapers”51 in Manhattan is driven by the

unconscious of nineteenth-century New York.52 Manhattan is the result of “the conquest of

the irrational,” or “the conscious exploitation of the unconscious.”53

The Manhattan Grid, according to Koolhaas, is the result of “the superiority of mental

construction over reality.”54 It symbolizes an American dream, a real dream for architects, orin Koolhaas’s word, “undreamt-of freedom for three-dimensional anarchy” created by



“the Grid’s two-dimensional discipline.”55 He describes Manhattan’s grid system asdefining “a new balance between control and de-control in which the city can be at thesame time ordered and fluid, a metropolis of rigid chaos.” The city itself is rendered “amosaic of episodes, each with its own particular life span, that contest each other through the

medium of the Grid.56 At the same time, The Grid makes Manhattan a generic city, free fromidentity and contextual burden:

The Generic City is the city liberated from the captivity of center, from the straitjacket ofidentity. The Generic City breaks with this destructive cycle of dependency: it is nothing but areflection of present need and present ability. It is the city without history. It is big enough foreverybody. It is easy. It does not need maintenance. If it gets too small it just expands. If it getsold it just self-destructs and renews. It is equally exciting – or unexciting – everywhere. It is‘superficial’ – like a Hollywood studio lot, it can produce a new identity every Mondaymorning.57

Does Beijing, under autocratic rule and with its obsession with architectural landmarks, sharethe same unconscious? The new CCTV headquarters may have become the new signaturelandmark of Beijing, but the symbolic significance of the Forbidden City has by no means

disappeared.58 Communist China has appropriated tradition. And tradition is now deployedmerely as spectacle. It visually narrates the historical fact that Beijing was a great city longbefore Paris and London, and that its greatness now lies in the fact that the ChineseCommunist Party has been able to regenerate it as a city as post-modern as New York. Thefantastical reinvention of the dynastical concept of the Middle Kingdom into modern capitalisttriumph could only be accomplished through the authoritarian control of the Chinese

Communist Party.59 The coexistence of the new CCTV Headquarters and the monumentalForbidden Palace forms a dialectical montage cementing the autocratic power of thecommunist regime. The ordinary, everyday contradictory and conflictual social life of Beijing isplaced outside the frame. When Beijing is represented through an image of the Forbidden City,devoid of local inhabitants but crowded with globalized tourists, it is being misrepresented. TheQing emperor has gone. Beijing, like Tokyo, has an empty center,60 that is best represented by“emptiness.” Between the new CCTV Headquarters (a generic, post-modern building) andthe Forbidden City (an evacuated tradition without coherent reference to the present) Beijingis being dialectically (mis-)represented and de-contextualized by two architectural icons. It isbeing compressed into a postmodern spectacle. Its formalized expression exists as adecoration of itself as “the society of the spectacle” and performs an identity as thin as the

piece of paper employed in Eason Tsang’s artwork below61 (fig. 5):



Fig. 5. Eason Tsang, Landmark No. 6, 2012.62

Conclusion: The Beijing World Park and the Film, The World

The World is a 2004 Chinese film that was filmed in and around The Beijing World Park. Writtenand directed by Jia Zhangke, the film tells the story of two workers at The Park, Tao (aperformer) and Taishen (her boyfriend who works as a security guard at The World Park). Thefilm, The World, visually presents to us the fact that World Park, an entertainment park, is hell.There is nothing outside “the society of the spectacle.” No escape is possible when the worldis made up of the spectacle of an already surrealist world. What Benjamin writes aboutBaudelaire may be illuminating about the city of Beijing:

Marx could hardly have wished for a better reader of the following lines from the EighteenthBrumaire: “When the Puritans complained at the Council of Constance about the wicked livesof the popes … Cardinal Pierre d’Ailly thundered at them: ‘Only the devil incarnate cansave the Catholic church, and you demand angels.’ Thus the French bourgeoisie cried afterthe coup d’etat: “Only the head of the Society of the Tenth of December can savebourgeois society! Only theft can save property, perjury can save religion, bastardy the family,and disorder order.”’63

The World Park is a dead place at night, as seen in the film, The World (fig. 7). It appears as acollection of “tombs.” It is the depthless fake. In fig. 7, Taisheng is carrying a horse through theWorld Park. Everything seems to be surreal. In fact, he turns out to be a security guard patrollingin World Park. It is impossible to distinguish between fiction and reality.



Fig.7. Still from The World.

Though the sightseeing tour train that takes visitors through The World Park is not fast, in the film,The World, the train appears as a high speed one to be effective as part of the ideologicalapparatus. When a color fan moves too fast, it turns grey. It is as if nothing is moving at all.When everything is moving too fast, the colors of life are screened out; complexity is

flattened64 The speed of globalization “pollutes” the world.65 Progress is simultaneously anti-progress. When speed destroys the psychic experience of moving from one place to another,dislocation is the result. The spectator is distracted, and loses the sense of differences betweenthe local and the global, inside and outside, truth or falsity, reality and dream, living and dying,changes and stability. The city becomes “schizophrenic.” Walking it takes a postmodern turn

easily.66 Beijing in the twenty-first century is being turned into ruins by the hyper-speeds ofspectacle fetishism.

In Woody Allen’s film, Manhattan, silhouettes of characters’ faces are seen in front of adramatically lit large photograph of Saturn (an allegory of melancholy). They are being placedin surrealist space. The World, like Manhattan, depicts, in Woody Allen’s word, the “spiritualemptiness” of the people in Beijing inhabiting the emptiness of The World Park with itshollowed out hallowed architecture. The World is a feature film but can be read as a surrealist

documentary film.67 It manifests what is behind The World Park: the phantasmagoric spectacleof melancholy and schizophrenia. The only escape is to accelerate capitalism until it collapses.One way of reading Koolhaas is to say that he may understand the impossibility of strugglingagainst or resisting the forces of capitalism. What we should do instead is to seize and exploit

those forces to the extreme.68 If Koolhaas had a chance to see The World, he might see it asan urgent message to architects to accelerate their constructions.

--------Ian Ho-yin Fong is Lecturer for the School of Continuing and Professional Studies, The ChineseUniversity of Hong Kong and is responsible for teaching courses in popular culture and mediastudies. He is working on a research project entitled “Walking in Chinese Modern Cities:Shanghai, Hong Kong, Taipei, and Beijing,” His research interests include psychoanalysis,deconstruction, Nietzsche studies, film and literary studies, gender studies, and the city andknowledge.--------

Notes:

1 The Park is located at the southwest of Fengtai District, Beijing, 16 kilometers away from TianAn Men Square. See “General Information,” Beijing World Park, accessed June 19, 2012,http://www.beijingworldpark.com.cn/overview/index.php?id=2.



2 “The World Park Picture,” China Connection Tour, accessed September 23, 2014,http://www.china-tour.cn/China-Pictures/The_World_Park_in_Beijing.htm3 Jean Baudrillard, “Simulacra and Simulations,” Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Stanford,California: Stanford University Press, 2001), 174-5.4 Bernard Tschumi, “Urban Pleasures and the Moral Good,” Assemblage 25 (December,1994): 115 Debord says, “The spectacle was born from the world’s loss of unity, and the immediateexpansion of the modern spectacle reveals the enormity of this loss. … In the spectacle, a partof the world presents itself to the world and is superior to it. The spectacle is simply the commonlanguage of this separation. Spectators are linked solely by their one-way relationship to thevery centre that keeps them isolated from each other. The spectacle thus reunites theseparated, but it reunites them only in their separateness.” See Guy Debord, Society of theSpectacle, trans. Ken Knabb (London: Rebel Press, 2003), 15-6.6 Marc Augé, Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. JohnHowe (London: Verso, 1995), 77-8.7 Tambling and Lo ask, “Why do tourists photograph themselves in front of a historicalbuilding? Is it to remind ourselves that we have indeed been there? As if saying if we had nottaken a photograph, we could not prove it, as if we no longer have memory. We needsouvenirs, and photograph ourselves before we have truly seen the building: the copy (thephotograph) precedes the original in the importance ascribed to it.” See Jeremy Tamblingand Louis Lo, Walking Macao, Reading the Baroque (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press,2009), 16.8 Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 10-11.9 On the difference between “users” and “inhabitants,” Herman Hertzberger says, “Themore responsibility users have for an area—and consequently the more influence they canexert on it—the more care and love they will be prepared to invest in it. And the more suitablethe area is for their own specific uses the more they will appropriate it. Thus users becomeinhabitants.” See Herman Hertzberger, “The Public Realm” from Architecture and Urbanism(1991) in The City Cultures Reader, eds., Malcolm Miles et al. (London and New York:Routledge, 2000), 253.10 Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life, trans. Stuart Elden andGerald Moore (London: Continuum, 2004), 15.11 Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and OtherWritings on Media, eds., Michael W. Jennings, et al, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al. (Cambridge,Massachusetts; London: Belknap Press, 2008), 40.12 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York; London: Routledge,2006), 156-221.13 Ibid., 189.14 Derrida says, “The Thing is neither dead nor alive, it is dead and alive at the same time. Itsurvives.” (192)15 Ibid., 187 & 189.16 Ibid., 202.17 The World is an abstract space which carries the capitalist ideology. With reference toLefebvre’s concept of social space, Abbas says, “The more abstract the space, the moreimportant the image becomes …., and the more dominant becomes the visual as a mode.”(9)18 Anthony D. King and Abidin Kusno, “On Be(ij)ing in the World: ‘Postmodernism,’‘Globalization,’ and the Making of Transnational Space in China,” in Postmodernism andChina, eds. Arif Dirlik and Xudong Zhang (Durham; London: Duke UP, 2000), 44-6.19 King and Kusno discuss how urban and architectural forms can be cut from the particularhistoric urban experience of some societies and cultures, and “pasted” into another societyand culture (47).20 Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, trans. Harry Zohn (London; New York: Verso, 1999), 176.21 Mona Domosh, Invented Cities: The Creation of Landscape in Nineteenth-Century New Yorkand Boston (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996), 76; quoted in King and Kusno,“On Be(ij)ing in the World,” 49.22 Singapore raises questions for Koolhaas that are being raised more and more urgently bypolitical theorists writing on the United States: “whether democracy promotes or erodes social



stability; whether free speech is worth the cultural trash it also produces.” See Rem Koolhaas,S, M, L, XL, 1013; quoted in William S. Saunders, “Rem Koolhaas’s Writing on Cites: PoeticPerception and Gnomic Fantasy,” in Writing Urbanism, eds. Douglas Kelbaugh and Kit KrankelMcCullough (London; New York: Routledge, 2008), 216.23 On the general discussion of neoliberalism, see David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Alfredo Saad-Filho and Deborah Johnston, eds.,Neoliberalism: A Critical Reader (London: Pluto Press, 2005). On neoliberalism in China, seeHarvey, “Neoliberalism “with Chinese Characteristics,” A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 120-51; Wang Hui, “The Year 1989 and the Historical Roots of Neoliberalism in China,” The End ofthe Revolution: China and the Limits of Modernity (London: Verso, 2009); Wang Hui, China’sNew Order, ed. Theodore Huters (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2003). Inits preface, Theodore Huters writes, “Wang Hui has been a leading figure in the contentiousdiscourse within China over the relationship between the changes that have taken place inpost-Mao China and the force of global capitalism.’ (5) Wang writes, “The creation oftoday’s market society was not the result of a sequence of spontaneous events, but rather ofstate interference and violence” (65).24 Colin Rowe, and Fred Koetter, Collage City (Cambridge, Massachusetts; London: The MITPress, 1983), 126.25 This is indebted to Carl Giometti, “Integrating Urbanisms: Growing Places between NewUrbanism and Post-Urbanism,” in Writing Urbanism, 197. She is describing post-urbanism. Suchcity, she writes, “meant only to be experienced in a certain environment, a Disneyland ofarchitecture.” (197)26 See Oliver Wainwright, “Does Beijing’s New People’s Daily building remind you ofanything?” The Guardian, accessed November 5, 2013,http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/architecture-design-blog/2013/may/10/beijing-peoples-daily-giant-penis. Photography by Imaginechina/Rex Features.27 Quoted in Fred A. Bernstein, “Le Corbusier and New York City: A Love-Hate Relationship,”in Architectural Record (June 12, 2013), accessed September 10, 2013,http://archrecord.construction.com/news/2013/06/130612-Le-Corbusier-and-New-York-City-A-Love-Hate-Relationship.asp.28 Georges Bataille, “Architecture,” in Against Architecture: The Writings of George Bataille,ed. Denis Hollier, trans. Betsy Wing (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1989), 47.29 Tschumi says, “Architecture, unfortunately, lies behind other disciplines, particularly art andpolitical studies, in its investigations of the structuring of social space. It continues to describethat space as a given, a thing, that can be alternately served or serviced through specificprograms, ‘functions.’ In consequence, it regards the social unproblematically, ignoring theways in which the social is articulated or brought into being in and through building. The waysin which programs dynamize space, either impeding or activating social processes, is rarelyaddressed, nor is the way in which that space is constituted as a process. Fixing things –‘architecture is an art of pinning things down,’ to quote the Times - is the unfortunate focusof architectural discourse.” See Bernard Tschumi, “Urban Pleasures and the Moral Good,”Assemblage 25 (December, 1994): 10. In this sense, architects should read Lefebvre’sProduction of Space. Thomas Fisher says, “In the case of the architect commissioned by thatrepressive government, he could walk away from the commission and protect his reputationamong those who find it offensive to do anything for that regime. … But it remains a viable—and ethical—option to keep such a commission and use it to create a non-oppressiveenvironment for as many as possible … [T]he architect …would be better off not declining thecommission up-front but, instead, pushing the project as far as humanly possible to benefit thepeople and all of the people who use it through a design that embodies such virtues as justiceand courage, honesty and respect, generosity and acceptance of differences. If the clientprevents him from achieving such qualities, the very components of what makes a building‘good,’ the architect should walk away from the project and let the oppressors oppresssomeone else.” See Thomas Fisher, Ethics for Architects (New York: Princeton ArchitecturalPress, 2010), 10-1. Ong says, “Western critics have asked whether [global architecture] bothconfigures and symbolizes potential freedoms that are denied by the state, or whether“starchitects” are engaging in a kind of propaganda for autocratic regimes. … There are theethics of building an extravagant foreign-designed spectacle (the CCTV project cost over $1billion) in a developing country, and the eviction of hundreds of residents from the buildingsite.” See Ong, “Hyperbuilding,” 215. Instead of walking away, the world architects run toserve oppressive regimes instead.



30 Daniel Solomon, “Whatever Happened to Modernity,” in Writing Urbanism, eds. DouglasKelbaugh and Kit Krankel McCullough (London; New York: Routledge, 2008), 160. An essay iswritten in response to Koolhaas’s “Whatever Happened to Urbanism,” New York Times (1March 1998). He writes, “Huge swaths of Beijing are being cleared by real-estate developersto make way for high-rise apartments, office buildings and shopping centers. The familiarsyndrome of urban renewal is drastically changing the face of an ancient city within a fewyears. Within a few years around 90 percent of the old neighbourhood will be cleared.”Quoted in Anthony D. King and Abidin Kusno, “On Be(ij)ing in the World: ‘Postmodernism,’‘Globalization,’ and the Making of Transnational Space in China,” in Postmodernism andChina, eds. Arif Dirlik and Xudong Zhang (Durham; London: Duke UP, 2000), 41.31 See “CCTV – Headquarters, China, Beijing, 2002,” OMA, accessed November 6, 2013,http://www.oma.eu/projects/2002/cctv-%E2%80%93-headquarters.32 Rem Koolhaas and OMA, “Beijing Manifesto,” in Wired 12.08 (August 2004): 120, accessedNovember 13, 2013, http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.08/images/FF_120_beijing.pdf.33 Aihwa Ong, “Hyperbuilding: Spectacle, Speculation, and the Hyperspace of Sovereignty,”in Worlding Cities, ed. A. Roy and A. Ong (Chichester, West Sussex; Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 214. 34 Koolhaas’s CCTV Towers contains two sloping steel structures in the design. Such a design,to him, set the sheer outrageousness of the problem before the engineers he was working with.He asks, “Why do they never say no?” See “Beijing Manifesto,” 129.35 King and Kusno, 49.36 See King and Kusno, 49-50.37 See “CCTV – Headquarters, China, Beijing, 2002,” OMA, accessed November 6, 2013,http://www.oma.eu/projects/2002/cctv-%E2%80%93-headquarters.38 Nicolai Ouroussoff, “Koolhaas, Delirious in Beijing,” New York Times, July 11, 2011, accessedNovember 5, 2003, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/13/arts/design/koolhaass-cctv-building-fits-beijing-as-city-of-the-future.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&.39 See Daniel Solomon, “Whatever Happened to Modernity,” in Writing Urbanism, 160.40 Ong writes, “The CCTV center is a building of barbaric beauty that presides over four cityblocks in China’s capital, facing off with the towers of corporate capitalism.” See AihwaOng, “Hyperbuilding,” 216.41 Margonelli says for his “Invisible Geographies” series, “My fascination with the industriallandscape began when I was a child living in a small industrial town, where I explored thehollowed out remains of factories and warehouses. Today I find myself seeking out these sameenvironments that evoke the emotional power of these early experiences. My photographs areof solemn settings outside the flow of time where haunted dream images coalesce with thefragments of neighborhoods long ago fallen into disuse.” See “Artist Statement” for theexhibition, “Three Dimensions—Architectural Photography: Peter Margonelli, Dick Chan, andEason Tsang” in the Blindspot Gallery, Hong Kong, 9 June–7 July, 2012, accessed 27 June,2012, http://www.blindspotgallery.com/en/exhibitions/current/three-dimensions/artist-statement-peter-margonelli.42 Digital inkjet print, 60 x 90 cm, edition of 10, Blindspot Gallery, reproduced from BlindspotGallery, accessed June 27, 2012, http://www.blindspotgallery.com/en/artists/artists-18/peter-margonelli.43 This saying is from a Chinese critic quoted in New York Times, July 11, 2011, accessedNovember 5, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/13/arts/design/koolhaass-cctv-building-fits-beijing-as-city-of-the-future.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&.44 Ong, “Hyperbuilding,” 207-8.45 Ibid., 89.46 Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau, “Bigness,” Small, Medium, Large, Extra-large: Office forMetropolitan Architecture, ed. Jennifer Sigler (New York: Monacelli Press, 1995), 515.47 Aihwa Ong writes, “Asian cities have been viewed as a blatant cooptation of architecturalinnovation by repressive states.” (223) Shannon Matten notes that “[a]s the medium oftelevision grows increasingly decentralized through digitalization and mobilization, and asChina’s state media faces increasing competition from other media in other forms and fromother places, the symbolic significance of a huge, monolithic structure will become even moreimportant in signalling the continuing power of this state institution.” On this, see the discussionof S. Matten in “Broadcasting Space: China Central Television’s new headquarters,”



International Journal of Communication 2 (2008): 869-908; quoted in Ong, 223. Architectscome to China to dream an architectural dream. Capitalists use this chance to make money.To Richard Ingersoll, “Bigness means surrender to ‘bidness’ … more than, as Koolhaas says,‘surrender to technologies; to engineers, contractors, manufacturers; to politics; to others … arealignment with neutrality.” See Richard Ingersoll, “Bidness,” Any 10:5; quoted in William S.Saunders, “Rem Koolhaas’s Writing on Cites: Poetic Perception and Gnomic Fantasy,”Writing Urbanism, 208; for Koolhaas, see S,M, L, XL, 514. Ong further asks if the western architectsare engaging in a kind of propaganda for autocratic regimes (215).48 “For Koolhaas, the hyperbuilding” is the “anti-skyscraper”; that is, not defined by itsexhilarating height, but by a striking and gigantic presence of the ground surface.” See AihwaOng, “Hyperbuilding: Spectacle, Speculation, and the Hyperspace of Sovereignty,” inWorlding Cities, ed. A. Roy and A. Ong (Chichester, West Sussex; Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell,2011), 207.49 This essay agrees with the challenge made by King and Kusno who question whether thesign of the spectacular skyscraper “can still claim to be a globally recognized, internationallyacclaimed signifier of modernity.” They argue that “[a]s far as Western notions of urbanmodernity are concerned, a range of paradigm shifts has taken place in recent years:gargantuan architectural icons of corporate capitalism have been replaced byenvironmental indicators that put ecological, energy, and health concerns as moreappropriate signifiers of the modern city.” (63)50 A term used by King and Kusno to describe the contemporary major cities in China.51 To Koolhaas, Manhattan’s culture is the “culture of congestion.” See Rem Koolhaas,Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (New York: Monacelli Press, 1994),10.52 No wonder, Koolhaas put Le Corbusier and Dalí together in Delirious New York. (235-82)53 To Koolhaas, Dalí in the late twenties of the last century injects the Paranoid-Critical Method(PCM) into Surrealism. Its motto is “The Conquest of the Irrational.” Instead of the passive anduncritical surrender to the subconscious of the early Surrealist automatisms, Dalí proposes asecond-phase Surrealism: the conscious exploitation of the unconscious through the PCM. Onthis, see Delirious New York, 235-45.54 Ibid., 20.55 Ibid., 20.56 Koolhaas, Delirious New York, 20-1.57 Koolhaas, “The Generic City,” in Internationalizing Cultural Studies: An Anthology, eds.Ackbar Abbas and John Nguyet Erni (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 639.58 King and Kusno write, “No high-rise towers are allowed to be visible from the walledcourtyards of the imperial palace (61).59 The ancient Chinese emperors had a false perception that China (literally “the middlekingdom” in Chinese) was the center of the world. World Park in Beijing manifests thisbackward looking tradition of contemporary Beijing.60 This is indebted to Barthes’ discussion of Tokyo. See Roland Barthes, “Center-City, EmptyCenter,” Empire of Signs, trans. Richard Howard (London: Jonathan Cape, 1983), 30-2.61 This can be read in parallel with Jameson’s discussion of depthlessness of Wells Fargo Court(Skidmore, Owings and Merrill). See Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic ofLate Capitalism (London; New York: Verso), 12-3.62 Digital inkjet print, 66 x 100cm, Edition of 5. Blindspot Gallery. Reproduced from BlindspotGallery, accessed June 27, 2012, http://www.blindspotgallery.com/en/artists/artists-18/eason-tsang.63 Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, 24-5. He quotes from Karl Marx, Der achtzehnte Brumaire desLouis Bonaparte, ed. David Riazanov (Vienna, 1917), 124.64 I am indebted to Paul Virilio. He quotes from Paul Morand who writes in 1937, “Speeddestroys color: when a gyroscope is spinning fast every thing goes grey [.]” See Paul Virilio,“Grey Ecology,” Open Sky, trans. Julie Rose (London; New York: Verso, 1997), 59.65 Ibid, 58.66 On the relationship between schizophrenia and postmodernism, see Jameson,Postmodernism, 25-31.67 This term is borrowed from Catherine Russell in her reading of Luis Buñuel’s LasHurdes (1933). See Catherine Russell, “Surrealist Ethnography,” Experimental Ethnography:



The Work of Film in the Age of Video (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 26-47.68 I am indebted here to Harry Francis Mallgrave and David Goodman, An Introduction toArchitectural Theory (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 178.

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The World as Theme Park

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