The politics of heritage in a river-city: imperial, hyper-colonial, and globalising Tianjin

Abstract

The intent of this article is to analyse the interconnectedness between urban transformation and eco-heritage value over time in Tianjin from a river-city perspective. The focus is on the Hai River’s (海河) contribution to the mechanisms of space and power in imperial, hyper-colonial, and globalising Tianjin. After an analytical excursus of the Haihe’s historical-political-economic roles, attention is given to the Haihe as the fulcrum of Tianjin's creation as a spectacle city in present times. The objectives are to elucidate the Tianjin Municipal Government-led urban ‘beautification’ strategy and analyse the aims and objectives of the 2002 ‘Comprehensive Reconstruction and Redevelopment Plan of the Haihe’s Riversides’ while also considering the actual experience of this transformation. The premise of this article is that the Haihe River has helped determine Tianjin’s politics of design via heritagisation: the historical processes through which cultural heritage is adapted to strategically promote favourable imagery of the river-city for political management purposes.

1 Introduction

‘As a metropolis with both traditional and modern beauty, Tianjin boasts many places of historical interest, western-style buildings, residences of historic figures, and enchanting forests, lakes, and beaches. (…) The Hai River is the pride of Tianjin, and it is made even more beautiful by those impressive buildings, terraced platforms, and theme parks along the riversides. (….) Impressive statues along the riversides and waterfront buildings combine to make a belt of beauty’ (Liu 2008, 89).

The name of the river that runs through the Chinese port city of Tianjin could be translated into English as ‘The Sea River’ or ‘The River to the Sea’, depending on how one interprets the uncanny Chinese compound word Haihe (海河, literally ‘sea’ + ‘river’). The common English translation is the Hai River, but in this article, this river is simply called the Haihe. In this article, mixed methods research is adopted, and three interdisciplinary trajectories are followed.

• 1) First, through a historical–geographical prism, we analyse the role that the river has played in the past, both during the construction of the imperial city and then during the construction of the ‘modern city’ in the colonial period. The importance of Tianjin as a river-city is considered via its role in connecting governance and river management in both past and present attempts to create prosperity and promote a ‘success story’ for Tianjin. This connection is the focus of the first three sections ‘The Hai River and the City of Tianjin, The Haihe: The ‘Mother River’ of Tianjin and The Haihe’s Past and Present Importance and Management Challenges’.

• 2) Second, an analytical-interpretive approach that draws from urban studies and critical post-humanities is adopted in this study. A proposal is made that the Haihe River has significantly contributed to the construction of the city as a textual-spatial category and to the political aspects of designing the city to be a spectacle; the Haihe acts as a stage by showcasing Tianjin as a river-city. Therefore, the fourth section ‘The Connection between Hydrology and Statecraft in China’ acknowledges the traditional interconnectedness between hydrology and statecraft in China and adds the perspective of heritage studies, which emphasises the importance of Tianjin’s politics of design via heritagisation during urban redevelopment. These connections are the focus of the whole article.

• 3) Third, after the historical–geographical excursus and the theoretical proposition, the last two sections of the article ‘The Haihe as the Fulcrum of the City of Spectacle’ and ‘The Redevelopment of the Haihe Riverbanks: An Ethnography of Eco-heritage’ concentrate more specifically on the ‘Comprehensive Plan for the Reconstruction and Redevelopment of Both Sides of the Haihe’ (《海河两岸综合开发改造规划》) launched in November 2002 (‘Haihe Plan 2002’ for short). These two sections conduct an in-depth analysis of the programmatic objectives and the actual implementation of the masterplan through document analysis and semistructured interviews with residents, urban planners, and policymakers.

This interdisciplinary lens is necessary to offer a more holistic approach to the study of Tianjin as a river-city and elucidate the politics of design centred on the Haihe as a catalysing force for recent urban reconstruction and redevelopment. The focus of this article goes beyond the mere economic and commercial recognition of Tianjin’s ambitions to globalise; it embodies the transformation of the cityscape during the last thirty years and evaluates the historical–geographical and socioecological value of the Haihe River. Through this process, this study contributes to the field of heritage ecologies by clarifying the interrelation between the built form and the natural (human and more-than-human) environmental capital.

1.1 The Hai River and the city of Tianjin

The Haihe is much more than a river. From a geomorphological perspective, it is a river system (海河水系 Haihe shuixi). The Haihe, whose source is in the Taihang mountains in the Shanxi province, is at the centre of a complex network of waterways that connects it to its tributaries. These tributaries flow from west to east and reach the Bohai Sea at Tanggu while bringing together the northern and southern parts of the Grand Canal (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1

The map of Tianjin (Source: National Bureau of Surveying and Mapping Geographic Information, map approval code: GS[2019]3333)

Tianjin’s historical development depended on its strategic location on the Haihe, whose upper course was formed (Fig. 2) by the convergence of the southern canal, the Ziya River, the Daqing River, the Yongding River, and the northern canal. Through the Grand Canal, the Haihe is also connected to the Yellow River and the Yangtze River. Figure 1 clearly shows that after the five waterways converge in Tianjin, the Haihe flows for 70 kilometres before emptying into the Bohai Gulf. The total length of Haihe is 1,329 km (826 miles) when accounting for its longest tributary; however, the focus of this article is the interconnectedness of the Haihe with the city of Tianjin, which is studied as a river-city.

Fig. 2

The Haihe River basin (Source: reproduced with permission granted from Jia 2011)

The complexity of this intrinsic relationship between the river and the city is debated in historiography (Ye 2016, 121–138; Li 2017, 64–86; Li 2022, 157–179; Hai-Ho Conservancy Board 1920; PTT 1897, 2) and epitomised by the plethora of recent commercial and tourist-related¹ materials (Liu 2003; Jia 2004; Lai and Yang 2004; Luo 2005), which present the Haihe as both the backbone of the city of Tianjin and its key attraction. Historian Hong Zhang summarised the river’s key functions: ‘The Hai River nourished the city and witnessed its growth. It meanders into the estuary of the sea. Tianjin was also the closest point where foreign ocean-going ships could approach the Qing capital of Beijing’ (Zhang 2018, 68). Therefore, the Haihe is both a crucial historical asset and an indispensable economic resource for the city; this view is also supported by its current heritage value due its key role in Tianjin’s overall urban reconstruction and redevelopment project. However, the role of the Haihe as a determinant agent of change and a receiver has not been adequately studied, particularly since the Haihe can be defined as an agent of prosperity. From a holistic urban redevelopment perspective, it is essential to acknowledge that Tianjin is a river-city: waterways and built forms are equally important and work together to support everyday life; these roles are appropriate and expected for comprehensive urban redevelopment. Therefore, the Haihe offers a distinctive angle for understanding the ramifications of cultural and eco-socially sustainable heritage preservation and value creation and the contributions of an integrated river-city approach to Tianjin’s present-future prosperity.

1.2 The Haihe: The ‘Mother River’ of Tianjin

Covering a catchment area of 122,858 m² (318,200 km²), the Haihe is often referred to as Tianjin’s ‘Mother River (muqinhe)’; therefore, it becomes a metonymy of the city itself.² The Haihe crosses the six districts of the city centre, which are the most economically prosperous and developed areas of the Tianjin Municipality. More specifically, the river flows through the central business area, located in the Heping district. Here, one can find numerous commercial centres, such as the first and oldest shopping mall in China, the famous Quanyechang, built in 1928 by Gao Xiangqiao in the former French concession (Zhao et al. 2018); many other shops are also found here, especially in Bingjiangdao and Hepinglu, Tianjin’s main thoroughfare and shopping area.

According to the literature produced for the 2004 commemoration of the 600th anniversary of the founding of Tianjn in 1404,³ the Haihe assumes an anthropomorphic semblance, which is based on its strategic contributions to city improvements⁶ and its unifying function as historical-symbolic capital for its inhabitants over the centuries. Today, the Haihe still plays a major role as a symbol of Tianjin: ‘With its long history and beauty, the Haihe attracts visitors worldwide. It is a river endowed with sea strength and river tenderness’.⁴ These characteristics of strength and tenderness ascribed to the ‘Mother River’ resonate with the ideal Daoist balance of forces (yin and yang) while simultaneously emphasising the affective relationality between the Haihe and the city; they project and construct an highly positive narrative of the river and Tianjin. This image is used to present and market the Haihe today; however, both the spatialities and the temporalities of the river are extremely complex. One could argue that the river is always present and intertwined with the city—from both a natural-environmental and a socioeconomic perspective—across time and space. The presence of the Haihe is evident via examinations of the geomorphology of the city of Tianjin and its interconnectedness, through waterways, with regional and national geomorphology. the Haihe was and still is the key agent for Tianjin’s historical development and its distinctive political-economic identity.

The role of rivers in the development of Chinese cities, in relation to both their local economies and the subregions that they influence or create, is a fascinating and burgeoning field of study. Thierry Sanjuan, in his in-depth investigation of the Yangtze River, concludes that the Yangtze River can be seen as a symbolic tool of regional planning that can be strategically used to reassert the national unity of the Chinese territory (Sanjuan 2004). Harry den Hartog adopted a longue durée perspective to analyse the urbanisation of the Yangtze River Delta along shipping channels and emphasised its relevant environmental challenges (Den Hartog 2023). A recent study on the impact of the regional integration strategy (RIS) on city-region formation emphasised both the positive and the negative impacts of industrial integration due to spatial heterogeneity within city regions (Zhen, Shi, and Lu 2023). In the case of the Haihe, one challenge is that a focused study may not support the construction of a linear narrative or the inference of a fixed teleology: the Haihe’s local socioeconomic and symbolic significance is deeply intertwined with the regional, national, and international position of Tianjin. Thus, this river-city should be explored as both a text and a spectacle of imperial, hyper-colonial, and globalising dreams. After a brief historical excursus, I concentrate more specifically on the politics of design centred on the Haihe as a catalysing force for recent urban reconstruction and redevelopment; this exploration could also be more holistically considered as a study of the river-city of Tianjin. Tianjin, an international port, is identified as a river-city because it acquired political-economic significance after becoming a treaty port in 1860. Only at that point did the muddy coast where the port of Tianjin is located (far from the city) in the Bohai Sea become strategically important—it is now one of the busiest seaways in the world today. However, historically, the economic importance of Tianjin’s ‘ports’ (trans-shipment points) that existed prior to 1860 was derived from their locations on the Haihe. As I will demonstrate in this article, the politics of design via heritagisation capitalised on the Haihe as the focal point for the redevelopment of the city.

1.3 The Haihe’s past and present importance and management challenges

The Haihe was opened for navigation 1800 years ago. Because the Haihe was at the juncture between the two sections of the Grand Canal, proto-Tianjin became an important trans-shipment centre, especially for rice and silk, by the time of the Tang dynasty; even though the foundation of ‘Tianjin’ is a garrison town as well as a shipping station, historical records inform us that the spatial–temporal evolution of its human settlement was an early accomplishment of the Ming dynasty (Zhao et al. 2023). The military fortress of Tianjinwei, on the Haihe, was established on 23 December 1404, when Ming Emperor Yongle (1360–1424) renamed the former town of Zhigu (literally meaning: ‘straight port’). Significantly, Zhigu was also the ancient name of the Haihe until the late Ming period (Jia 2005, 1–4)⁵; the more extended version for the newly baptised Tianjin was Tianzi duhe zhi di, which literally means ‘The place where the Son of Heaven crossed the river’⁶ and is often shortened into ‘The Ford of Heaven’ (Zhang 2003, 31). The renaming had two significant symbolic functions. The first one was political, since it was here that Yongle had forded the crucially important Haihe to defeat his nephew, Zhu Yunwen (Emperor Jianwen, r. 1399–1403), whereupon he usurped the throne and proclaimed himself emperor. The second function was economic since this name implied the recognition of Tianjin’s crucial role in relation to the newly established and landlocked Ming capital Beijing (after the transfer of the Imperial Throne from Nanjing in the south to Beijing in the north). Historically, Tianjin’s position at the northern terminus of the main economic and political artery between northern and southern China, the Grand Canal, guaranteed the transport not only of rice and silk but also of grains and fruit from the south (especially from the fertile lands of the Yangtze Delta region) to the capital. This factor played a very important role in the politics of constructing the imagery of a unified Empire. During the Yuan and Ming dynasties, the Canal, whose various sections were first connected during the short-lived Sui dynasty (581–618 CE) with the help of an enormous amount of conscripted labour (Needham 1971, 308; Ebrey 1996, 114), was rebuilt. Its route was altered to guarantee that supplies could reach the capital and, therefore, the subsistence of the court and the military garrisons along the northeastern frontier; these undertakings were alternative routes along the coastline were too uncertain and were infested with pirates. Technically, however, the trans-shipment did not occur in Tianjin itself; the smaller boats would arrive at Tanggu, where the cargo was then transferred onto barges and moved via canal to Tongzhou (Michie 1864, 56–58). From here, the cargo was transported to Beijing, the capital. Tianjin benefited immensely from this system of national and interregional economic trade. This system also created the foundation for international trade, which started in the modern period. In Imperial China, even before the forced opening up of the treaty port system, the Grand Canal guaranteed the political and economic integration of the Empire, and Tianjin played a crucial role in this process of empire building, economic security, and political stability preservation (Li and Zheng 2020).

By the mid-18th century, however, half of Beijing’s grains were still produced and shipped from the south, but up to 20% of the revenues of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) were engulfed by the demands of the Grand Canal. When internal and external factors (such as the 1839–60 Opium Wars) caused the progressive weakening of the Qing dynasty, the expensive engineering and hydraulic works necessary to maintain the Canal were abandoned. Consequently, unemployed boatmen diverted their energy into secret societies that engaged in organised crime and in plots against the emperor. Some of them were recruited by a failed Confucian scholar, Hong Xiuquan, who believed himself to be Jesus Christ’s young brother. He started the Taiping rebellion, which lasted for fourteen years (1850–1864) and caused 20–30 million civilians and soldiers to lose their lives. Significantly, the Taiping occupied and fought for a decade across much of the middle and lower Yangtze Valley, which are some of the wealthiest and most productive lands in the Qing Empire, before reaching the capital Beijing.

Today, a few vestiges of the ancient city of Tianjin that were built after 1403 (Fig. 3) are still visible on the right side of the Haihe. They are uncannily intermingled and juxtaposed with architecture from the former foreign concessions, which were created from 1860 onwards, and the ‘new period’s Tianjin’, which was built after the ‘opening up’ and the reforms of the post-Mao era. Thus, the Haihe is a unique witness of Tianjin’s historical and urban transformations (plural and stratified over time), since on the riversides, one can perceive various heterogeneous architectural styles that Zhang Yingjing has defined as ‘classic, eclectic, Sino-occidental, Chinese and modern’ (Zhang 2012, 77).

Fig. 3

天津城厢保甲全图 ‘Complete Map of the Community Self-defence System of the Walled City of Tianjin and its Environs’. Haihe’s tributaries flow into the river, which flows on the northeastern side of the walled city (Source: Reading Digital Atlas, https://digitalatlas.asdc.sinica.edu.tw/digitalatlasen/map_detail.jsp?id=A103000149)

A period of relative neglect occurred during the Maoist era, when the river ceased to play a key economic function, in part due to the development of the railway system and the redevelopment of the streetways system after 1949. Then, in the post-Mao era, the potential of the river to help address the problems derived from accelerated, dispersive urban growth and the consequent environmental degradation became clear. The 1986 Tianjin urban masterplan (TJMG 1986) contained a proposal to move industries towards the estuary of the Haihe, turning the river into a strategic development axis by connecting a secondary centre to the city’s core centre; this approach provides economic support and is in line with a multilevel polycentric urban system planning strategy (Wang, Wang, and Kintrea 2020). Over time, this system led to the creation of a special economic zone known after 1994 as the Tianjin Binhai New Area (天津滨海新区, TBNA); it was located on the coast of the Bohai Sea, east of Tianjin's main urban area (TJMG 1986, 2).⁷ The Binhai New Area is officially presented as the ‘Dragon’s head’ of Tianjin’s opening up; it is the equivalent of Shanghai’s Pudong New Area. Binhai maintained an annual growth rate of nearly 30%, and its GDP effectively outpaced that of Pudong in December 2010 (Song 2010).

In March 2011, on the eve of the 2011 Terminal Operator Conference Asia (the oldest and most prestigious shipping port and terminal industry event), Tianjin was marketed as the ‘Gateway to the World’. For Tianjin’s policymakers, this meant something more than Beijing’s Gateway to the World; it infused into the redevelopment discourse an echo of Tianjin’s past hyper-colonial-global glories. In China, the three crucial areas of urban transformation and the associated rhetoric display of a state narrative of global modernity are the Pearl River Delta in the south, which started developing in the 1980s; the Yangtze River Delta in the east, whose development accelerated in the 1990s; and Bohai Gulf in the north, centred on Beijing and Tianjin, which started developing in the early 2000s. Earmarked as a strategic component of the 11th Five Year Plan for National Economic and Social Development (2006–2010), Bohai Gulf has progressively become a rising northern economic powerhouse and now rivals both the Pearl and Yangtze River Deltas; a competitive port cluster has developed around Tianjin—the metropolis that has tried to re-establish its pre-Communist era status as the industrial capital of the northeast (Marinelli 2018).

However, the Haihe is not only an instrument that can contribute to creating and narrating a metropolitan ‘success story’; in the last few decades, due to industrial and urban development in the Hai Basin, the volume of water flow has also fallen significantly. One of the main problems with the Hai River, similar to the Yellow River (which, due to its recurrent and devastating floods, has sadly gained the appellation of ‘China's sorrow’), is its management because these rivers are sediment rich. The excessive presence of mud derives from the powdery loess soil through which the Haihe flows. Silt is carried by water deposits, especially in the lower reaches, and can cause flooding (Wang, Joseph H., and Charles S 2014).

There have been five major projects involving the redevelopment of the Haihe from the last decade of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) to the beginning of the 21 century (Wang 2014). The first four projects focused on seven different diversion and recovery works that occurred from 1901 onwards to facilitate flow and transport on the river. These included the construction of dams and landfill pipes to separate clean water and wastewater in 1958; the establishment of flood control areas from the mid-1960s; and the project to ‘capture water from the Yellow River to feed the Hai River’ in 1983 to solve the problem of desiccation caused by overexploitation.

The five tributaries are dry for most of the year or present a shallow outlet to the sea, which increases the risk of floods. Reduced water flow is strongly associated with water pollution and overgrown waterweed, which is creating considerable problems. According to the 2009 State of the Environment Report issued by the Ministry of Environmental Protection, 68.3% of the water quality is considered poor and inadequate for human contact.⁸ The 2016 State of the Environment Report reiterated that the waters of the Haihe and its tributaries are ‘heavily polluted’, with 68.9% of the water quality between poor (52%) and very poor (16.9%).⁹ A series of reservoirs and artificial channels have been created to avoid floods, while the South–North Water Transfer Project is expected, at least in part, to alleviate the water shortage in the tributaries; however, the management of the river is still in progress (Song et al. 2006). This is a considerable issue if one considers the intrinsic relationship between river management and governance in China.

1.4 The connection between hydrology and statecraft in China

Throughout history, one can witness the progressive emergence of the Haihe as a political, economic, and culturally symbolic asset. The Haihe connects the city to both the Grand Canal and the sea. Ultimately, the river enables Tianjin to play a crucial role for the political capital, Beijing, its port, and therefore its access to the national and international maritime routes. Moreover, further elaboration on the thought-provoking idea that the city is a text or ‘a spatial categorisation’ (Tariz 2021), since the urban space can be ‘written’ and ‘read’, can lead to structured explorations of the environment and ecosystem (while remembering the politics of ‘showing’ related to the progressive evolution of the contemporary city as a spectacle, saturated with real and virtual images, data networks and information). In the case of Tianjin, the performative power of these two functions can be ascribed to the Haihe. The Haihe significantly contributes both to the construction of the city as a text-spatial categorisation and to the politics of designing the city as a spectacle.

Concerning Tianjin as a text, the geomorphology of the city can be compared to a body; the river is the main artery since it visibly runs through the city, mimicking blood that circulates to keep a body alive. This is significant, not just as an allegorical humanisation of the city but also as a way to characterise the city as ‘the urban’, in line with the insightful Lefebvrian concept (in his pioneering 1970 work La révolution urbaine). This concept states that ‘the urban’ is much more than the city, since it includes the built environment, urban phenomenon, urban space and landscape, urban practice, and ultimately urban ideology (Lefebvre 2003). In this sense, the ‘urban’ opens up a complex field of inquiry that investigates the quality of life of urban inhabitants. The urban context holds together the contexts of the embodied experience of individuals living in the city and allows us to explore individual creativity, social relations, and the search for prosperity. Within this conceptual framework, in the present posthuman condition, the river’s textual and spatial perspective on the urban environment brings to the fore the relationality of humans with the more-than-human. Seeing the Haihe as the main artery (the aorta), with its connected waterways representing the bloodlines of a complex human organism (the veins), allows us to conceptualise Tianjin as a river-city. The water acts as a fundamental paradigm for reasserting both the value of human-more-than-human and the politics of designing urban nature via infrastructure engineering, which utilises waterways to redevelop the city. A focus on water and particularly on rivers, as key elements of urban nature (Edwards, Popartan, and Pettersen 2023), enables a better exploration of the nature-culture continuum in urban and public spaces as ‘novel ecosystems’, especially since the Haihe Riverfront has been reconfigured as a public space in the last twenty years. Paraphrasing Michel De Certeau (1988), the significance of ‘walking along the river’ could be investigated as part of the horizontal tactics of the citizens living in (or visiting) a city such as Tianjin, which has been strategically transmogrified in a spectacle for touristic consumption. (Fig. 4).

Fig. 4

Walking along the Haihe, 2023 (Source: Liu Xiaochen)

Furthermore, cities are very vulnerable to flooding, and river-city governments have recently developed both engineering and art-educational projects (such as Rivers of the World and Totally Thames Festivals in London) to raise community awareness of rivers as public spaces, where new meanings of community and identity are negotiated and constructed (Curtis 2019, 185; Sutton 2022).

A river-oriented focus enables the study of how nature and culture are reinvented in the urban ecosystem; a critical post-humanities lens (Braidotti 2019) is applied to analyse the river-city as a spatial-social category. Traditional notions of the public realm founded merely on the concept of citizenship are no longer central to the current and future development of cities. The accelerating digitalisation of life and the extreme consequences of the Anthropocene have disrupted how we think about and inhabit urban public space. Rather than idealised notions and forms of agoras, urban public spaces today are interrelated natural-human-technological habitats. While the proliferation of digital public spheres has shifted civic sites of cultural-political formation and agonistic struggle away from physical space, there is a growing recognition of both the agency and vulnerability of more-than-human agents in the city. This has led to major changes in how urban public space projects are imagined, delivered, and funded in various parts of the world. There are at least two fundamental dimensions to analyse here in relation to the Haihe as a space of public interaction: one national (regarding the governance of the whole of China) and one local (concerning the Haihe as the fulcrum of Tianjin’s central city redevelopment strategy). As we will see, these two dynamics are often intertwined.

In Chinese civilisation, the human-nature-culture continuum is particularly significant, from both a historical and a philosophical point of view. Through Chinese historical development, the control of waterways has been acknowledged as a crucial indicator of good governance. The mythical founder of the legendary Xia dynasty, Emperor Yu the Great (from 2200–2101 BCE), is remembered from 4,000 years ago because of his ability to tame floods; significantly, his hydrological-engineering-managerial skills, which allegedly led to the creation of stability and order, are associated with his moral qualities (Wang 1993, 42). Every Emperor appointed a flood control specialist, and in the case of the Qing era’s Kangxi Emperor (r. 1662–1722), his expert Yu Qing poignantly argued, ‘Waterways are like blood and qi.¹⁰ When they are blocked, illness develops. When they are adequately dredged, they are healthy’ (Chen 2008, 530). The idea of harmony and order—as opposed to chaos—as a crucial tenet to the Empire’s system of governance was strictly associated with the control of the waterways, though not only in antient China (Ball 2016). Similarly, in 1920s, the well-known engineer Li Yizhi explained his management philosophies and flood control guidelines by comparing water with the circulation of blood and qi in the human body (Li 1928). The use of the human body as a metaphor for the manifestations of water indicates that China had a long tradition of viewing water, as well as other elements of the natural world, as a public good that serves productive pursuits, namely, agricultural, in its human communities and as a public value that guarantees a healthy system of governance.

If one imagines the city as a body, the Haihe and its tributaries are connective tissues for the different parts and organs of the body-city, as are its bridges. The positionality of the bridges over the Haihe River shows the intersection between the past and present history: at the time of the foreign concessions (1860–1945), the construction of bridges became a contested and contentious issue of fundamental importance since they were indispensable for connecting the different concessions established on the left and right banks of the river. Of symbolic significance was the construction of the International Bridge (Wanguoqiao), also called the Settlement Bridge: a 96.7 m-long, double-leaf bascule drawbridge built in 1927 following intense negotiations among the foreign powers controlling different concessions in Tianjin (it effectively connected the French concession with the Italian one, north of the Haihe). Significantly, after the foundation of the People’s Republic of China on 1st October 1949, the International Bridge was rebaptised the Liberation Bridge (Jiefangqiao). Today, it is one of Tianjin’s historical landmarks and serves as a tourist attraction with food trucks and concerts; the ‘spectacle’ of opening occurs at a maximum angle of 60 degrees at specific times. (Fig. 5) As shown below, bridges have been developed through the redevelopment of the Haihe riversides, one of the most significant elements of the Tianjin Municipal Government’s ‘beautification’ strategy: bridges are the stage to display and showcase the city.

Fig. 5

Tianjin’s International Bridge in the Past (Old Postcard), which is now the landmark Liberation Bridge (Source: Liu Xiaochen)

1.5 The Haihe as the Fulcrum of the City of Spectacle

In the post-Mao era, industrial redevelopment and the modernisation of the urban transport system in Tianjin gradually caused its ecosystem to deteriorate. The river became a scarcely used waterway and even a hindrance to urban redevelopment. In the mid-1990s, however, the Tianjin Municipal Government reconsidered the value of the Haihe, and the development of a plan for the economic utilisation and public valorisation of the river embankment area began to take shape (TJMG 1999). However, only at the beginning of the 21st century did the riverfront area become the object of a dramatic facelift, mostly for touristic purposes. During the previous period, various descriptions of the river suggested that it was dirty, unclean, uncared for and neglected. A proposal was launched to design and build the new bridges on the Haihe. Today, with its famous 26 bridges, Tianjin, which is marketed as ‘The Pearl of the Bohai’, has been rebaptised ‘the river-city’ (hecheng), the ‘city of bridges’ (qiaocheng) and, more recently, ‘the design city’ (设计之都 sheji zhi du) (TJRB 2022). These appellatives are used by tourist websites to compare Tianjin with Venice or Pittsburgh, while the Haihe itself is often compared with La Seine in Paris or with Florence’s Arno River and Rome’s Tiber.¹¹

This marketing strategy appeared to be in line with the Tianjin Municipal Government’s ‘Comprehensive Plan for the Reconstruction and Redevelopment of Both Sides of the Haihe’ (from now onwards: the masterplan) launched in November 2002. The masterplan had the goal of ‘building the river as an economic, landscape and cultural belt with a unique character, and putting forwards a great vision of extolling the river culture and creating the Haihe as one of the world's most famous rivers’ (TJRB 2022). The plan was strategically important for upholding the vision of restoring Tianjin to its status as an international river-city in northern China. The policy documents emphasised, as part of the aims and objectives, the promotion and development of what was defined as ‘the Haihe culture’ and the intention to redevelop the waterfront ‘as a world-class river and as a landscape corridor’, since this was seen as an essential component in Tianjin’s bid, vis-à-vis other Chinese cities, to assert a strong cosmopolitan identity, building on its past and projecting its present renaissance into the future. The masterplan has involved numerous large-scale planning and reconstruction projects, which have radically transformed the Haihe in terms of land reclamation, architectural landscaping of riversides, and waterway traffic. (Fig. 6) The 2002 masterplan has had a significant impact on the overall reconceptualisation of the relationship between Tianjin and Haihe, particularly since its implementation was premised on the concept that reconstruction and redevelopment of the riverfront should occur in harmony with Tianjin’s urban redevelopment while respecting the ecosystem.

Fig. 6

A view of two districts separated by the Haihe, 2023: on the left-hand side, the Shangri-La Hotel and the adjacent newly built luxury ‘first-line river-view residences’ (一线河景住宅), in the Hedong District. On the right side, the ‘old’ architecture is under the Heping District (Source: Liu Xiaochen)

The crucial concept was that the Haihe was the axial skeleton of Tianjin’s spatial redevelopment, which meant that the maximisation of the land value of Tianjin’s waterfront area constituted the core of the strategy devised to upgrade Tianjin’s built environment and promote its renaissance (Fig. 7).

The scheme focused on the development of the upstream region of Haihe (in the city centre) by dividing it into four functional areas (from left to right): the Cultural Heritage District, indicated in yellow; the Urban Entertainment District, indicated in red; the Central Business District, indicated in pink; and the Smart Town, indicated in green (Fig. 7). The scheme proposed 42 development projects to be launched as international tenders: 14 in the commercial area of traditional culture, 7 in the urban leisure and consumer area, 5 in the trade and finance area, and 16 in the smart city.

Fig. 7

The 2002 Plan for the redevelopment of the Haihe riversides. 1: Cultural Heritage District (历史文化风貌区). 2: Urban Entertainment District (都会消费娱乐区). 3: Central Business District (中央商贸金融区). 4: Smart Town (智慧城) (Source: Tianjin Municipality)

In the minds of the policymakers and the urban planners, the development of the Haihe was defined as ‘comprehensive (wanquan)’ for three main reasons. First, the connection between the Haihe and Tianjin’s urban redevelopment was seen as the driver of the regional economy. Second, the land value increased due to the added value of the historical capital recognised by the urban waterfront. Third, the benefits included the revitalisation of a vibrant urban lifestyle, in harmony with the newly discovered vitality of the Haihe riversides. Ultimately, the plan envisioned a dialectical relationship between Haihe and the city, as they would mutually benefit from the redevelopment: the functional adjustment of the riversides was important for the overall renaissance of the central urban area.

From the very beginning, the core area was clearly the central area, because of both its historical-cultural significance and its potential as a business centre: the area between Dagu Bridge and Bei’an Bridge went through significant redevelopment on both sides of the Haihe. On the northern riverside, this development had to be coordinated with the redevelopment of Tianjin’s Italian Style Town,¹² the construction of office buildings and hotels, and the redevelopment of Tianjin railway station, while on the southern riverside, the construction of the Jinwan Plaza as a landmark commercial centre took central stage; the adjacent hotels and apartment blocks, office buildings and cultural facilities (new library, theatre, etc.) also played a pivotal function. The planning emphasised the importance of the beautification process, including the riverwalks along the Haihe, a waterfront square, the parks, and the vegetation to form a water-friendly landscape belt.

Furthermore, the plan emphasised the importance of eco-sustainability in the interaction between Haihe and the urban environment: this implied the implementation of specific measures to guarantee ecologically sustainable landscaping and engineering of the Haihe riversides and Tianjin itself. However, one of the greatest challenges for this eco-sustainable development was the complex relationship between ecological concerns, landscape architecture, water and nonwater traffic, cultural-historical preservation, and tourism as a marketing tool to guarantee the profitability of the overall operation. The focus on the Haihe as a fundamental factor in promoting sustainable urban development was a positive element in the masterplan; however, in the central urban area, the discourse of ‘sustainability’ (可持续性 kechixuxing) and ‘commodification’ (商品化 shangpinhua) of space, especially to increase the exchange value, dangerously overlapped and led to asymmetric ways of reasoning and problematic decision-making (Marinelli 2010). However, one of the key advantages, considering the regression of the old port in the new century, included the use of Haihe as the axial skeleton of Tianjin’s spatial development; this approach helped connect the central urban area with the Binhai new area (designated as a district in 2009), which effectively functions as the port of Tianjin on the Bohai Sea (Wang 2008, 168).

However, how the structure of Tianjin’s water system has evolved over time is important to remember. From a historical perspective, the masterplan would appear to build upon and valorise the historical evolution of the relationship between the Haihe and the city of Tianjin. By comparing a significant number of historical maps that identify the waterways in relation to the evolution of the city of Tianjin, Zhang Kun offered an in-depth multitemporal analysis of the redevelopment of the riverfront between 1739 and 2014 (Zhang 2014). Zhang identified four major features of the evolution of the Haihe in line with the expansion of the built-up area of the city of Tianjin: 1.) artificial watercourses have emerged and are identified as urban boundaries, as are drainage and transportation canals; 2.) some tributaries of the Haihe have been transformed into urban roads; 3.) sections of initially curved rivers have been straightened and shortened; and finally 4.) a large area (in the southwestern part of the city centre), which was once rich in water, has disappeared due to urban expansion (Zhang 2014, 17). This proves that the Haihe has been the fulcrum of Tianjin’s urban transformation over time, even though a perfect synergy between the river and the city is difficult to find.

1.6 The Redevelopment of the Haihe riverbanks: an ethnography of eco-heritage

In 2002, one year after Beijing was selected as the host of the 2008 Olympic Games, the project to redevelop the Haihe embankment area was launched with the aim of developing the waterfront as a single economic and landscape area. More specifically, the 2002 master plan for riverfront redevelopment highlighted six thematic objectives: 1) cultural capital to showcase Tianjin’s long history and culture; 2.) economic capital to develop the river service industry; 3.) symbolic capital to integrate the river with the city via a coherent identification strategy in which city features are interconnected with river images (Connolly 2017); 4.) ecological preservation to define the ‘natural river’ as a crucial element of the ecological civilisation embedded in the city; 5.) transport system to coordinate transportation between the two riverbanks and improve access to the river; and 6.) tourism development to offer recreation resources for residents and tourists along the river (Wang 2008, 10–12).

Charm, strength, symbolic capital, nature-ecology, cohesion, and vitality were key terms for Tianjin’s urban redevelopment in the 1990s, but in the Haihe embankment area from 2002 onwards, the river was envisioned as the agent and the engine of a new phase, both conceptually and empirically, of redevelopment in action; more attention was given to the synergy between economic gains (GDP growth) and new ideas of eco-sustainable prosperity. To achieve the six thematic objectives, the 2002 master plan divided Haihe into three sections for renovation: upstream (cultural and economic metropolis, 19 km, 42 km²), middle (natural and ecological landscape zone, 18 km, 120 km²) and downstream (modern and industrial port, 39 km, 150 km²) (Fig. 8). (Zhu and Sun 2009)

Fig. 8

The Haihe as the stage of the city, 2023: the Jinwan Plaza (one of the busiest business areas), surrounded by the financial street, Tianjin Railway station, the Jinwan theatre and the newly built luxury towers called 津湾天玺 (Source: Liu Xiaochen)

The redevelopment of the Haihe riversides in the central area attracted significant foreign capital investment. Two of the most active firms were Scott Wilson Architect LLC, especially in relation to the Guotao Bridge and the ‘Riverside 66’ retail-office megaproject in the central urban area (Bridge 2006) landscape scheme along the Haihe in 2004–05, and the US-led global design and professional technical services company AECOM,¹³ which is responsible for the success of the ‘Tianjin Haihe Corridor Strategic Development and Embankment’ in the upstream section.¹⁴ These projects covered the central area of Tianjin, which was deemed to be the most important part of the overall project in terms of ecosystem management in relation to cultural heritage.

AECOM was involved in ‘the overall strategic plan and environmental master plan for the 20 km Haihe corridor’ and, more specifically, in the redevelopment of the Haihe embankment enhancement. From the design of the 10 km embankment area to its implementation, AECOM claimed to have given particular attention to creating ‘focal open spaces injected with new landscape features that relate to and reflect the existing cultural heritage’ (Bridge 2006). The AECOM followed the Tianjin Government’s 2002 masterplan to position the Haihe at the centre of the city’s revitalisation efforts. Significantly, the AECOM project conceptualised the Haihe embankment as providing ‘a public open space for local residents to regain their lives via the city’s mother river’ (Bridge 2006).¹⁵ All of these initiatives were in line with the government’s intention to capitalise on the Haihe and thus strengthen Tianjin’s cosmopolitan identity, since, as AECOM states, ‘Tianjin’s new international waterfront will be a focal point for the further development of Tianjin as a world-class city’ (Bridge 2006). Tianjin’s global ambitions have both reinterpreted its hyper-colonial past, seen as the beginning of the creation of Tianjin as a modern city (Marinelli 2009), and used an interreferential approach towards other cities in China—primarily Shanghai—and in the world. Therefore, understanding what role the redevelopment of the Haihe riversides plays in creating a river-city spectacle is important. The redevelopment of the embankment area intended to use history and culture as unique tourism-related resources in synergy with the revitalisation of the Haihe and the former concessions’ area itself.

From 2010–2019, the author conducted a series of semistructured interviews with various stakeholders, including Tianjin residents, cultural heritage volunteers, architects, urban planners, and policymakers. Interviewees were recruited by invitations, and interviews were combined with frequent physical visits to Tianjin. Thematic analysis was used to evaluate qualitative data on stakeholders’ perceptions to identify patterns and themes while analysing inductive data. The results are presented below.

There is a consensus that the 2002 masterplan had a significant impact on the development of Tianjin. The redevelopment of the Haihe riversides has led to a radical change in the existing land use: old factories, old low-rise and densely populated residential buildings have been demolished; large parcels of land have been earmarked for mixed use or commercial purposes. The old community neighbourhoods have been replaced by clusters of high-rise residential buildings with commercial facilities. The dramatic change in the post-redevelopment riversides has been accompanied by the new skyline of the city: skyscrapers on the riverfront have become the landmarks of Tianjin. The waterfront is the stage and the mirror of the city’s ‘success story’ (Fig. 9).

Fig. 9

The Haihe as a stage for the city of Tianjin, 2023 (Source: Liu Xiaochen)

Due to the interconnectedness between the development of Haihe and the city, the value of the waterfront has become much more apparent. From an economic point of view, this value is expressed both by land redevelopment—with an increase in exchange value—and by the promotion of architecture on both riversides. One of the crucial questions, after redevelopment, relates to the environmental and ecological benefits that, according to policymakers, have become evident: the policy documents argue that after the completion of the drainage works, the water quality improved significantly; certainly, many trees were planted, and several green areas were created along the banks. Furthermore, the embankments of the riparian areas provided public spaces open to the activities of the local population.

Both architects and policymakers emphasised the ‘beautiful’ reconstruction of the Haihe riversides landscape environment, the efficiency of the construction of transport facilities, and the adaptation of the urban spatial structure across the Haihe as crucially positive elements. These three factors are seen as key to regional economic development; the land appreciation and value regeneration of the historical waterfront area of the city are strictly interrelated, which leads policymakers to value the ‘enormous advantages of the landscape engineering along the Haihe’.¹⁶ Ultimately, the Haihe is recognised as the crucial driver for the development of the urban centre and the increased vitality of urban life. The term that is often used is ‘rejuvenation’ (复兴 fuxing) (Marinelli 2009). Government documents seem to highlight the success of all 10 main projects included in the masterplan: water treatment, dike reconstruction, road engineering, bridge engineering, navigation engineering, park and flora development, environmental landscape engineering, night lighting, public works, and architectural renovation.

Policymakers and urban planners mentioned the masterplan, specifically, as a key to the success of the Haihe Economic Belt and ascribed it to the ability to reassess the preexisting imbalance of economic development across the Haihe. According to the masterplan, particular attention should be given to the three sections of the Haihe, but importantly, the aims and objectives of its ‘comprehensive development and transformation’ were different, and the final outcomes varied significantly, with a clear emphasis on the upstream, identifiable central urban area. The local government officials emphasised the ‘Western character’ of Tianjin’s built heritage as a unique attribute worth capitalising upon since this adds value to the ‘distinctiveness’ (tese) of the Haihe’s identity.¹⁷ The alleged ‘uniqueness’ of the 16 new bridges (‘one bridge one style’, yi qiao yi jing) [the other 10 were renovated] is often mentioned as evidence of Tianjin’s world-class city reputation being comparable to that of La Seine, the Thames, and the Rhine. However, the following question remains about this kind of value: is this authentic heritage value? or even community value? Or mostly commodity value? Urbanism experts have identified these bridge designs as copies of ones that already exist (Zhao Boyang, Institute of Urbanism, quoted by Lu 2017, 152). For example, as noted by Lu Yue, the Bei'an Bridge, which was built in 1973, presents decorations inspired by the Alexandre III Bridge in Paris, while the Daguangming Bridge is reminiscent of the Bei'an Bridge due to its Western ‘classical’ decoration (Lu 2017, 151). The most blatant example of reproduction is the Tianjin Eye built in 2007 on the Yongle Bridge. It is a clear imitation of the London Eye but much larger than London’s original. (Fig. 10)

Fig. 10

The Daguanming Bridge on the Haihe, 2023 (Source: Liu Xiaochen)

However, prior to redevelopment, there were very few bridges connecting the two Haihe riversides. Furthermore, the connection was cumbersome, and the development of the two riversides was unbalanced and uncoordinated.

Residents and retailers were also concerned about the traffic along the river, and a few interviews also mentioned pedestrian access to the riversides. Furthermore, the urbanists acknowledged the essential transformation of Haihe’s primary function: from a means of transportation to a catalyst for the development of the tourism industry. This is a clear indication of the priority among the six thematic objectives for redevelopment. Ultimately, the masterplan underlined a new commercial-tourist-oriented strategy for the use of the river (in line with the sixth objective).

In August 2003, just six months after the beginning of the project, the tourist route of the Haihe had already been officially created. It is 15 km long and has forty tourist sites identified along the route. Subsequently, several works, including the renovation of the historic districts and the construction and/or reconstruction of bridges, were carried out under the coordinated supervision of the Haihe Construction Development Investment Ltd. (HEDO).

Adopting the concept of renovation by zoning, HEDO requalified seven ‘exotic areas’, creating an atmosphere of ‘other spaces’ that allegedly allowed visitors to ‘experience real-unreal countries without leaving China’. Each area was equipped with leisure and entertainment facilities, trade, business, and retail centres, theoretically to maximise the heritage value; however, in reality, the priority was to create a commodity space to develop the urban economy and local tourism.

In the redevelopment of these ‘exotic areas’, carefully identified in the former German, French, British, Italian, Austrian, and American concessions, the fluvial-centred symbolic geomorphology of these countries was particularly emphasised. A few interviewees recalled their visit to the ‘city of the Rhine’, which is the name of the German-style area in the Hexi district; its German-architecture-style Hotel Indigo Tianjin Haihe (Tianjin Haihe Yingdige Jiudian), unveiled in August 2012 on Jiefangnanlu,¹⁸ is a Tianjin-equivalent of the 2010 hotel by the same name (all managed by Intercontinental Hotel Groups (IHG) on the Shanghai Bund. The connection between the exotic areas is guaranteed by one of the 20 Pleasure Boats managed by the Tianjin Haihe River Boat Co., which on 4th September 2020 announced the first inland river ship using (lithium-ion) clean energy (EVE Energy 2020) as a practical example of the ecological civilisation and beautiful China strategy of preserving ‘lucid waters and lush mountains’. This fluvial course is proposed to reveal ‘the landscape of the Haihe’. Experiencing the boat trip along the Haihe River allows visitors to view the river as a spectacle and segment the riverfront into different tourist attraction areas with their respective entertainment functions, such as food provisions, hotels, and shopping areas. In the city centre, the visitors can also experience its intersection with the historical Grand Canal, which was awarded its position on the World Heritage List in 2014; thus, the use of its heritage as a brand is an everyday experience.

The interviews with the residents, however, revealed significant areas for improvement. Pedestrian access to the river is not always easy; roads subdivide the space; and the elevation from the roads to the riversides vary. The urban planners also noted a few unsatisfactory elements of the reconstruction plan, such as the lack of spatial scale planning along the river and the lack of systematic planning of the urban space to allow full integration with the waterfront. The main issue seems to be the lack of prioritising the community value of redevelopment: the newly constructed embankment of the Haihe, for example, is characterised by a hard landscape and low greening area. The scale of the newly built bridges is often lamented as being ‘too large’, with a tendency to ‘exaggerate the shape of the bridge to over-emphasise the novelty of the design’; an imbalance of the proportions of some of the bridges in relation to the space scale of the Haihe riversides is also noted. The built heritage strategy does not always respect the value of historic buildings. During repairs, some of them maintained at least the façade, but others were radically and arbitrarily transformed and juxtaposed with modern buildings whose style often clashes with preexisting ones. Furthermore, many buildings were not included under the ‘cultural heritage protection’ framework, and even if they had significant conservation value, they were demolished (Du 2010, and interviews of Tianjin Jiji members with the author 2010–2019). The various ‘Western-style’ architecture buildings constructed in the last twenty years on the Haihe riversides make it quite difficult to distinguish old renovated buildings from new buildings without a deep knowledge of the city’s history. These limitations point to the necessity of developing a comprehensive assessment framework with sociocultural categories as the core.

2 Discussion and Conclusions

This article focuses on Tianjin as a river-city, arguing through a historical–geographical lens that waterways and built form play equal and codependent roles in the historical development of the city and in the practices of everyday life. The politics of urban redevelopment and urban (re)design in Tianjin raise significant questions regarding the ways in which the Haihe has been integrated into the fabric of the contemporary city. Therefore, in this article, a proposal is made that studying Tianjin as a river-city can offer new insights into its eco-heritage value.

The Haihe is much more than a river: it has played and continues to play a crucial role in the processes of the construction and reconstruction of Tianjin as a ‘river-city’ to the extent that the Haihe has become a metonymy for Tianjin in the political-economic arena of urban redevelopment, which strategically links together urban design, mechanisms of urban governance, and economic development. Through an analysis of the continuities and discontinuities in the role of the Haihe as a catalyst of prosperity and an instrument to assert political legitimacy while reflecting the complex intertwining of cultural legacies (since water management has always been a crucial component of the Chinese art of governance), the hyper-colonial experience (with its dream of modernity, inscribed in the river’s management through infrastructural projects as the international bridge) is connected with the recent drive for urban regeneration, which capitalises on the historical legacy of Tianjin to confirm its place as a global city.

Thus, this article highlights the stratification of meanings (both socioeconomic and cultural) by which the reciprocal relationship between the river and the city has been conceptualised, developed, and progressively inscribed in Tianjin's urban landscape over time; it sheds light on Tianjin’s urban regeneration and cultural heritage policies. Thus, the article proves that the Haihe, both as a stage for the city’s hyper-colonial-global architecture and as a subject of inquiry, has become the most important asset in Tianjin’s urban redevelopment scheme and the symbol of the ‘success story’ of the Tianjin Municipal Government’s planning intervention, which intended to create a globalised city of spectacle.

The 2002 Haihe Master Plan redefined Tianjin’s identity and reconceptualised its development strategy by placing the Haihe at the centre of its urban revitalisation efforts. The redevelopment of the Haihe riversides shows how the river has evolved from an industrial production site to a recreational place. As part of the comprehensive redevelopment, the urban design included the conservation-adaptation of industrial workshops and river sewage along the riversides; the protection and reuse of buildings considered to have cultural value along the Haihe; and the urban regeneration of residential areas and service industries along the Haihe.

Moreover, as the Haihe is the symbol of Tianjin, the enhancement of its riversides is in line with ambitions to develop it as a world-renowned landscape corridor and stage and promote Tianjin’s globalised identity, actuating the politics of design through heritagisation.

The instrumental use of the Western image in the redevelopment of the riversides commodifies the remnants of the past (the hyper-colonial era) and intends to offer Tianjin a cosmopolitan position. This strategy supports the creation of a ‘modern vernacular’ style built on the heritage argument. However, this article contributes to the field of built heritage studies by highlighting the importance of adopting a more holistic approach to heritage. In accordance with the attention given by heritage ecologies to the ecosystem and the emphasis of critical post-humanities scholars, the river is recognised as a socio-spatial agent of change with fundamental public value in urban ecology; it is not merely a witness of the cultural heritage politics of ‘beautification’ and power by design. The intrinsic and fundamental function that the Haihe has played historically, politically, and economically, and that it continues to play today, underlines the porosity of the human-nature continuum in the river-city. The river is a crucial resource for the city: it is exactly the connection between urban functionality, symbolic capital, and heritage value, which Tianjin, as a river-city, could capitalise upon. The purpose of this article was to uncover the more nuanced and pluralistic ecologies of Tianjin’s heritage to counter the prevalence of spectacular representations of the city as an end in itself and extend the notions of public space and heritage value to the water itself. Thus, the tri-partite analytical approach offered in this article can be used to direct the development of a river-city’s natural potential; by enhancing consciousness of the eco-politics of heritage, this approach can ideally contribute to a more harmonious coexistence between humans and the urban nature of the river-city.