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State Owned Danwei Case Study

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This investment policy caused state-owned danwei to not only become governmentally and financially autonomous of their host city, but also able to offer a higher standard of services and facilities for their laborers than were accessible to urban dwellers in the collective-owned division or who did not belong to a danwei. As a result, “employees in state-owned danwei rose from 41.5% of the total urban workforce in 1952 to 61.7% by the end of the FFYP in 1957” (Bray 143). Rapid changes in housing development also were taking place, shifting from small-scale, craftsman-based construction based on centuries-old methods, and under socialism, shifting to a large-scale, extensively systematized mechanical method based on new advancements in technology. The arrival of the FFYP caused a dramatic transition in configuration of urban housing in China. The resultant architecture was gravely austere in appearance and gave visual evidence of the incessant transition of resources from consumption to production, which …show more content…

It was politically significant, because standardization and unification in architecture was viewed as reflecting a general unity. Politically, the new guidelines also mirrored an accelerating explicit commitment to socialist ideals. It was in this context that theories of urban planning, which rose out of over three decades of practices in the USSR and over a century in the West, were initiated and adapted to the cause of China’s socialist construction. The spatial construction of the danwei played a vital role in the construction of a certain mode of shared subjectivity. I believe a revolution is required to produce new space, because in order for it to be truly revolutionary, one needs to create a society that reflects its revolutionary ideology. It needs to drastically transform away from the systems and encourage its citizens to think and live

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