- By Gaoheng Zhang in 2024
Stephanie Malia Hom’s analysis of similarly conceived Italianate structures elsewhere argues that this phenomenon articulates both postcolonial vestiges of pleasure tourism and postmodern simulacra.[1] Bianca Bosker believes the Chinese efforts in building Western replicas are meant to showcase the country’s preeminence on the global stage since the 2000s.[2]
Francis Chia-Hui Lin offers another perspective from which to ponder the meaning of this Chinese phenomenon: it points to a common condition in cities in the “multilayered, sophisticated, and conventionally unpredictable Asia Pacific.”[3]
Lin is quoting Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia (literally, different-speech-ness). Through this lens, diverse articulations of Chinese, Italian, and American temporalities and locations contribute to the evolving dialogue on Italian and Italian-style architecture, urban spaces, and lifestyle in contemporary China. At the core of this dialogue is a tension. Consider that the dialogue regards an empirical phenomenon that we all agree exists. However, the dialogue offers a multitude of viewing points to extract meanings from the phenomenon.
Ultimately, the developmentalist-neoliberal chronotope embedded in Macau, Hangzhou, and Dalian leads to a web of situated utterances about a composite reality. Tourists’ embodied reactions to these sites would be fragmentary. Take myself for example. When I heard people dismissing these structures simply as tasteless copies of real Venice, I tried to explain how they served purposes that can be noble. For example, the image of Venice is communicated to Chinese tourists who may never set foot in Italy. Having domestic visits to Venetian sites also helps alleviate Venice’s woes with mass tourism.
On the other hand, when Chinese tourists relayed to me how they saw no point in experiencing Venice, Italy in person, because they had already seen the bell tower and sat in a gondola, I found myself thinking how the copy was not nearly as intriguing as the old city’s myriad bridges and lanes.
Here concludes our exploration of American Chinese Venices.
I hope that the visitor has gained more understanding of this phenomenon and will go to these sites to experience for themselves.
[1] Hom, Beautiful Country, 155-83.
[2] Bosker, Original Copies.
[3] Lin, Heteroglossia Asia, 5. For Bakhtin’s explanation of heteroglossia, see The Dialogic Imagination, 270-5.