Collectivisation, paradox and resistance: the architecture of people’s commune in China

Abstract

The people's commune [人民公社], an all-encompassing socio-political, economic, and spatial model of collectivisation in China during the 1950s and the 80s, played a fundamental role in the country's pursuit of modernity. Through the correlation between political forces and spatial production, the commune architecture articulated and enforced the construct of collective subjectivities. The coupling of collective canteens with the abolishment of family kitchens formalised a practice of everyday life that aimed to collectivise the socio-economic functions of dwelling and destabilise social ties formed in the extended family and the patriarchal clan system. The tensions between the modern state and family tradition led to the inherent paradox of the commune architecture: it spatially resembled and renewed the old structures it set out to destruct. The negotiation between the two regimes of power finds its embodiment in materialised details through implementation: the adapted ancestral temple as collective canteen and the renewed traditional three-jian [三开间, three-bay] principle in commune housing. Fieldwork spanning several years in the realised commune settlement of the then Shigushan Production Brigade in Wuhan [石骨山大队] reveals embodied conflicts, resistance, and readjustments of the people's commune as well as how it has become a constitutive part of China's rural society today. An essential addition to the non-canonical architectural histories outside the Western traditions and epistemologies, the architecture of people's commune in China opens up new ways to think about the socio-spatial organisation of networks of care and intergenerational living beyond the nuclear family.