ABSTRACT
Focusing on the design of industrial, residential, and civil projects in the Mao era, this chapter investigates the design institutes’ contribution to China’s socialist construction and the different ideologies subtly hidden in material practice. The establishment of state-owned design institutes was part of the Chinese Communist Party’s endeavors to legitimize its rule by transforming the country through the construction of buildings, factories, cities, and infrastructure. Zhang Kaiji graduated from Central University in Nanjing in 1935 and then worked in various design firms in Chongqing and Shanghai during the war. After joining the state-owned design institute in the early 1950s, he designed many important buildings in Beijing. The demand for socialist construction gave the architect a great opportunity midway through his career. People might easily associate the magnificent buildings in Beijing with other socialist constructions in the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War, such as Nicolae Ceausescu’s People’s Palace in Bucharest, Romania. Both sets of monumental buildings were the outcomes of dictatorship.
