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This thesis examines the school-based Olympic education (OE) programs implemented in the Beijing Olympic Games from both top-down and bottom-up perspectives. The research employs a three-pronged methodology for data collection, using textual analysis, semi-structured interviews with five key informants, and storytelling with six student participants. Findings suggest that OE in China was primarily government-led, with BOCOG, academic experts and numerous volunteers providing expertise and assistance. The students’ narratives shed light on how OE was conceptualized and experienced by its recipients as well as the useful role it served in revitalizing the traditional education system. To strengthen OE during future Games, the thesis recommends that future organizers and host governments embed programs of OE in the ongoing state school systems, set clear learning objectives in advance and monitor and evaluate implementation continually. It also recommends that future researchers continue this students’ focus on the student voice.

This thesis examines the school-based Olympic education (OE) programs implemented in the Beijing Olympic Games from both top-down and bottom-up perspectives. The research employs a three-pronged methodology for data collection, using textual analysis, semi-structured interviews with five key informants, and storytelling with six student participants. Findings suggest that OE in China was primarily government-led, with BOCOG, academic experts and numerous volunteers providing expertise and assistance. The students’ narratives shed light on how OE was conceptualized and experienced by its recipients as well as the useful role it served in revitalizing the traditional education system. To strengthen OE during future Games, the thesis recommends that future organizers and host governments embed programs of OE in the ongoing state school systems, set clear learning objectives in advance and monitor and evaluate implementation continually. It also recommends that future researchers continue this students’ focus on the student voice.

Since housing choice and strategy are the result of both an individual’s financial capability in a particular life stage, as well as overall political-economic circumstances, the study of housing behavior has been used to emphasize processes of urban development and social change. However, housing behavior in the Chinese context has not attracted much research attention. Although many studies have been done on various topics surrounding China’s housing reform, only several quantitative studies have touched upon the topic of individual housing behavior. All of the existing literature is based on statistics before 1998 when work-unit housing distribution was officially repealed. This thesis offers an update of qualitative information on how young white-collar workers approach homeownership after 1998. Ten young homeowners from Beijing, together with some practitioners in the housing market and two governmental officials were interviewed. Based on the information offered by the interviewees, this thesis examines how state policies, market situations, family structure, and special characteristics of Beijing as a capital city impact the housing choices and strategies of young homeowners.

From the four-thousand-year obsession with timber structures to the radical fascination of steel and glass in recent decades, in a Westerner's eye, Chinese architecture evolves either too slow or too fast. The current construction boom may seem parallel to Mao's Great Leap Forward in late 1950s, when the entire nation was taking radical action for socialist industrialization; this time, it is capitalist modernization. A polarized situation surfaces as some architects are willing to align with the government and drastically transform their architecture to keep up with the movement, while others are urging for an effort to connect the past and the present, so that traditions can continue to evolve along with technological advancement. Theories of modern Chinese architecture have birthed mainly from this debate. <br /><br /> The struggle with modernization began almost a century ago. After the fall of the Imperial Qing in 1911, foreign architects and local designers with Western academic backgrounds introduced formalism, functionalism, modernism, and traditionalism into the siheyuans (traditional courtyard houses) and imperial palaces of the capital city. The quest for a consciously "modern Chinese" architecture began. In the 1950s, China underwent a huge phase of reshaping along with the ascendancy of communism. The communist government adopted Soviet models to make Beijing a paradigm for social realism. They brought down ancient infrastructures and historical buildings to make way for monuments, worker apartments, and public squares. They advocated the idea of "national form and socialist content" to derive a new architecture. <br /><br /> From the 1980s on, Beijing and the entire nation began to enjoy the first-ever continuous twenty-five years of undisrupted time on urban and social development since the turning of the twentieth century. Under the open-door economic reform, the authorities began to transform Beijing into a cosmopolitan. The capital city was to perform not only as a showcase for political stability, but also to express the national image, values, and beliefs. They attempted to retain the tradition of Chinese order on one hand, and to welcome capitalist commodities and foreign technologies on the other. Citizens remain proud of their four-thousand-year heritage but are also overwhelmed by materialistic luxury from the economic boom. To the authorities, erasure of Beijing's physical past becomes legitimate under the reconstruction of selected heritage buildings and a rapid urban development. <br /><br /> Contemporary architecture in Beijing represents the chaotic phenomenon of today?s China. Bounded by its ghosted city wall, the rapidly changing capital epitomizes the conflict between the old and new. Pressures upon the shoulders of the local architects remain strong: political and economic constraints, legacies of the past, ambition to catch up with the world, and the urge of self-rediscovery in the globalized stage. What is the reality behind the ambition to catch up with the developed world? Is the desire to become modern and at the same time maintain their traditions only a <em>curl-de-sac</em> that leads to nowhere? <br /><br /> This thesis is a quest to revaluate the evolution of Chinese architecture from the classical Chinese curved-roof buildings to modern designs. In the making of modern Chinese architecture, a number of ideologies arise, along with political makeovers and societal developments, aiming to re-present past glories, to reflect present national achievements, and to reveal the dream of a utopian future. However, real living always comes second to political ideals on how the society should look and what they should head toward. The concern for humanity remains a nominal criterion after politics and economy in most of the construction projects. <br /><br /> This thesis focuses on a two-and-a-half-month journey in northern China. The journey is recorded in the form of a travelogue, which provides the narrative core of the thesis. In addition, the thesis includes academic research on Chinese architecture, embodied in four essays, to investigate its evolution, understand its relationship to the past, acknowledge its current dilemma, and search for the components that make up its identity for the twenty-first century. This thesis aims to give a sense of Chinese architectural development, both in theory and in practice, as well as including a collection of critical remarks on how the authorities manipulate architectural expressions and direct its development. The first two essays deal with urban symbolism in Beijing that the authorities have created to redefine the past and to construct an image of a bright future. Architects are only required to carry out duties, like civil servants, to realize governmental plans. The other two aim to make a contribution to the history of cultural fusion between China and the West, and the evolution of architectural theories that led to the current phenomenon, respectively. The former traces the evolutionary path of Chinese architecture and the latter compiles the concepts of Chinese architecture from the study of Chinese architecture to the realization of the buildings. <br /><br /> My journey begins with an exploration of ancient architecture in the provinces of Shanxi and Hebei, following the footsteps of architectural scholar Liang Sicheng. Liang and his team documented and studied 2,783 ancient buildings across the nation and wrote the first complete history on Chinese architecture. He then attempted to derive the principles of modern Chinese architecture from traditional essences. The Shanxi-Hebei experience enriched my knowledge in traditional Chinese architecture and showed me what had tempted the Chinese architects not to give up their traditions, despite a strong desire to move toward modernization. <br /><br /> My experience in Beijing, on the other hand, provided me the opportunity to understand the dilemma of Chinese architects of the twentieth century as they faced political pressures, economic restrictions, tense construction schedules, collective ideologies, and historical legacies. Their works play a crucial role of linking the contemporary with the traditional past, and unfolding possibilities to develop modern Chinese architecture. The quest for Chinese identity in architecture in the past few generations has imposed a complex layering of the urban structure of the city, which makes the capital a showcase for architectural ideologies of different eras. <br /><br /> In the current rapid "Manhattanization", Beijing has become an experimental ground for foreign futuristic ideas, as well as an open-air museum of imperial and socialist glories. The identity of the city is completely shaped by authorities and developers under a blindfold desire to pursue a global representation of modernization. Local architects receive little chance, time, and freedom to find their own path, make their own architecture, and develop their own profession. Societal criticisms remain scarce and creativity is limited by self-censorship. Yet, like their predecessors in the 1930s and 1950s, contemporary architects do not give up. Many of them still search for new design possibilities within the influences of traditions to innovations, and from local philosophies to Western ideologies. Although the pace of construction remains unbelievably fast in China, the development of local architecture struggles to find ways to evolve and express its societal significance. The maturity of the architectural profession remains an aspect that is unachievable through overnight transformations and one-time planning.

This thesis investigates a unique type of migrant housing in Beijing: underground hostels retrofitted from civil air defence basements. The core of this study consists of field research conducted from 2005-2006. Personal narratives, photographs, maps, and illustrations drawn from first-person experience construct an account of a neglected layer of the city. Political and economic reforms since the late 1970s initiated the formation of a new subaltern class in contemporary Chinese cities known as the floating population. Millions of migrants have flowed through China’s uneven economic landscape in pursuit of the Chinese Dream. There is an estimated 4 million migrants actively contributing to the construction of new Beijing, yet the subalterns are excluded from official State representations that focus on the monumental. Without proper household registration (hukou) status, rural migrants have little to no access to social welfare including subsidized housing. Migrants have, of necessity, developed unconventional habitats in the capital city. In the absence of officially sanctioned space, migrants seek shelter within cracks and fissures of the formal system. Just as the city is being shaped by the flow of capital, the inflow of the floating population shapes an alternative urban geography that remains largely invisible. Sanctioned yet unofficial, the migrants’ creative appropriation of space contributes to the development of an emergent urban vernacular. Portraits from below reveal furtive portions of Beijing: marginal, banal, and hidden stages upon which life unfolds.

From the four-thousand-year obsession with timber structures to the radical fascination of steel and glass in recent decades, in a Westerner's eye, Chinese architecture evolves either too slow or too fast. The current construction boom may seem parallel to Mao's Great Leap Forward in late 1950s, when the entire nation was taking radical action for socialist industrialization; this time, it is capitalist modernization. A polarized situation surfaces as some architects are willing to align with the government and drastically transform their architecture to keep up with the movement, while others are urging for an effort to connect the past and the present, so that traditions can continue to evolve along with technological advancement. Theories of modern Chinese architecture have birthed mainly from this debate. <br /><br /> The struggle with modernization began almost a century ago. After the fall of the Imperial Qing in 1911, foreign architects and local designers with Western academic backgrounds introduced formalism, functionalism, modernism, and traditionalism into the siheyuans (traditional courtyard houses) and imperial palaces of the capital city. The quest for a consciously "modern Chinese" architecture began. In the 1950s, China underwent a huge phase of reshaping along with the ascendancy of communism. The communist government adopted Soviet models to make Beijing a paradigm for social realism. They brought down ancient infrastructures and historical buildings to make way for monuments, worker apartments, and public squares. They advocated the idea of "national form and socialist content" to derive a new architecture. <br /><br /> From the 1980s on, Beijing and the entire nation began to enjoy the first-ever continuous twenty-five years of undisrupted time on urban and social development since the turning of the twentieth century. Under the open-door economic reform, the authorities began to transform Beijing into a cosmopolitan. The capital city was to perform not only as a showcase for political stability, but also to express the national image, values, and beliefs. They attempted to retain the tradition of Chinese order on one hand, and to welcome capitalist commodities and foreign technologies on the other. Citizens remain proud of their four-thousand-year heritage but are also overwhelmed by materialistic luxury from the economic boom. To the authorities, erasure of Beijing's physical past becomes legitimate under the reconstruction of selected heritage buildings and a rapid urban development. <br /><br /> Contemporary architecture in Beijing represents the chaotic phenomenon of today?s China. Bounded by its ghosted city wall, the rapidly changing capital epitomizes the conflict between the old and new. Pressures upon the shoulders of the local architects remain strong: political and economic constraints, legacies of the past, ambition to catch up with the world, and the urge of self-rediscovery in the globalized stage. What is the reality behind the ambition to catch up with the developed world? Is the desire to become modern and at the same time maintain their traditions only a <em>curl-de-sac</em> that leads to nowhere? <br /><br /> This thesis is a quest to revaluate the evolution of Chinese architecture from the classical Chinese curved-roof buildings to modern designs. In the making of modern Chinese architecture, a number of ideologies arise, along with political makeovers and societal developments, aiming to re-present past glories, to reflect present national achievements, and to reveal the dream of a utopian future. However, real living always comes second to political ideals on how the society should look and what they should head toward. The concern for humanity remains a nominal criterion after politics and economy in most of the construction projects. <br /><br /> This thesis focuses on a two-and-a-half-month journey in northern China. The journey is recorded in the form of a travelogue, which provides the narrative core of the thesis. In addition, the thesis includes academic research on Chinese architecture, embodied in four essays, to investigate its evolution, understand its relationship to the past, acknowledge its current dilemma, and search for the components that make up its identity for the twenty-first century. This thesis aims to give a sense of Chinese architectural development, both in theory and in practice, as well as including a collection of critical remarks on how the authorities manipulate architectural expressions and direct its development. The first two essays deal with urban symbolism in Beijing that the authorities have created to redefine the past and to construct an image of a bright future. Architects are only required to carry out duties, like civil servants, to realize governmental plans. The other two aim to make a contribution to the history of cultural fusion between China and the West, and the evolution of architectural theories that led to the current phenomenon, respectively. The former traces the evolutionary path of Chinese architecture and the latter compiles the concepts of Chinese architecture from the study of Chinese architecture to the realization of the buildings. <br /><br /> My journey begins with an exploration of ancient architecture in the provinces of Shanxi and Hebei, following the footsteps of architectural scholar Liang Sicheng. Liang and his team documented and studied 2,783 ancient buildings across the nation and wrote the first complete history on Chinese architecture. He then attempted to derive the principles of modern Chinese architecture from traditional essences. The Shanxi-Hebei experience enriched my knowledge in traditional Chinese architecture and showed me what had tempted the Chinese architects not to give up their traditions, despite a strong desire to move toward modernization. <br /><br /> My experience in Beijing, on the other hand, provided me the opportunity to understand the dilemma of Chinese architects of the twentieth century as they faced political pressures, economic restrictions, tense construction schedules, collective ideologies, and historical legacies. Their works play a crucial role of linking the contemporary with the traditional past, and unfolding possibilities to develop modern Chinese architecture. The quest for Chinese identity in architecture in the past few generations has imposed a complex layering of the urban structure of the city, which makes the capital a showcase for architectural ideologies of different eras. <br /><br /> In the current rapid "Manhattanization", Beijing has become an experimental ground for foreign futuristic ideas, as well as an open-air museum of imperial and socialist glories. The identity of the city is completely shaped by authorities and developers under a blindfold desire to pursue a global representation of modernization. Local architects receive little chance, time, and freedom to find their own path, make their own architecture, and develop their own profession. Societal criticisms remain scarce and creativity is limited by self-censorship. Yet, like their predecessors in the 1930s and 1950s, contemporary architects do not give up. Many of them still search for new design possibilities within the influences of traditions to innovations, and from local philosophies to Western ideologies. Although the pace of construction remains unbelievably fast in China, the development of local architecture struggles to find ways to evolve and express its societal significance. The maturity of the architectural profession remains an aspect that is unachievable through overnight transformations and one-time planning.

This thesis investigates a unique type of migrant housing in Beijing: underground hostels retrofitted from civil air defence basements. The core of this study consists of field research conducted from 2005-2006. Personal narratives, photographs, maps, and illustrations drawn from first-person experience construct an account of a neglected layer of the city. Political and economic reforms since the late 1970s initiated the formation of a new subaltern class in contemporary Chinese cities known as the floating population. Millions of migrants have flowed through China’s uneven economic landscape in pursuit of the Chinese Dream. There is an estimated 4 million migrants actively contributing to the construction of new Beijing, yet the subalterns are excluded from official State representations that focus on the monumental. Without proper household registration (hukou) status, rural migrants have little to no access to social welfare including subsidized housing. Migrants have, of necessity, developed unconventional habitats in the capital city. In the absence of officially sanctioned space, migrants seek shelter within cracks and fissures of the formal system. Just as the city is being shaped by the flow of capital, the inflow of the floating population shapes an alternative urban geography that remains largely invisible. Sanctioned yet unofficial, the migrants’ creative appropriation of space contributes to the development of an emergent urban vernacular. Portraits from below reveal furtive portions of Beijing: marginal, banal, and hidden stages upon which life unfolds.

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Thesis (M.A.)--University of Southern California, 2007. / Adviser: Akira Lippit. Includes bibliographical references.