The shadow of geography in modern Chinese thought is profound, for the understanding of a modern China above all relies on the interpretation of what China is. A population? A geography? A continental form of knowledge, modulated as cultural system? The interrogation of China’s two modern cities—Harbin and Shanghai[1]—reveals certain disparities in the approach toward geography and landscape, and the resultant subject position. Shanghai, whose name literally means “up against the sea,” and the soil of which is nearly entirely all the eroded dust from the banks of the Yangtze in the Chinese interior,[2] is the heir to the watery tradition of Jiangnan, the Yangtze region of water towns; Harbin, the frozen Siberian capital, was founded as an outpost in the middle of the “Great Northern Wasteland,” which has been tamed by the successive generations of labor fanning out from the transportation network of which Harbin is the center. Shanghai, then, has never been sufficiently solid or stable to be a capital; it errs on the avant-garde of flow, a slippery Atlantis. Harbin, with its gruff dialect, with its ripe and aged neighborhoods, with the earnest and clean faces glimpsed on the boulevards, is a city in which the earth has come to life.

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