Country Parks from Hong Kong to Shanghai: Hierarchical Landscape as Economic Engines

Abstract

The past decade has seen a rise in the number of country parks in Mainland China, which are described as an “import” of those in Hong Kong. However, based on their different topographies (mountains vs. fields), the country parks in Hong Kong and Mainland China have developed into varied typologies. This thesis asks whether there are actual connections between the country parks in these two systems.

I am looking at the newly established country parks in Shanghai to determine if their “precedents” derive from colonial and post-colonial Hong Kong because the adaptation of country parks from a colonial environment to a modern urban system indicates that while the purpose of parklands is green space, they appear to function in a very different manner in Hong Kong than in Shanghai, in order to 1) compare the country parks in Hong Kong that were created to maintain elite class identity by social exclusion, with the country parks in the modern Chinese system that fabricated pastoral tourism for the middle class and 2) to determine whether the British colonial model was adopted by the Chinese government to manipulate land use and change land ownership.

My thesis uncovers the intersections of the economic, political, and cultural factors, both explicit and implicit, and the mechanisms of how they are applied differently to the context of country parks in Hong Kong and Shanghai. I further compare the differences in how the land policies function and how protecting the interest of certain social classes while excluding others is a common goal.