Abstract

This chapter discusses the slow burn of development which has impacted the Chinese landscape for a long time, despite the country’s urbanization. Although China’s modernization has been underway for the last 150 years, the country’s current global visibility has been mistaken for a sudden eruption of modernity. China has been through a variety of struggles, and the struggle between beauty and pragmatism is portrayed in films about the poor and manifested through the class aspirations of the new rich. In this regard, the landscaping of China is mostly a narrative of continuous and traumatic pressure inflicted by the people on the motherland. These signs of struggle are, therefore, what articulate the Chinese landscape as a work of destruction and reconstruction in constant progress.