Traditionally, Beijing and Tianjin had formed a close interdependent relationship. Until the pre-modern era, they were organized as the capital and its peripheral city, and though this order reversed after modernization, but despite this superficial c...
Traditionally, Beijing and Tianjin had formed a close interdependent relationship. Until the pre-modern era, they were organized as the capital and its peripheral city, and though this order reversed after modernization, but despite this superficial change, the close interaction between Beijing and Tianjin was so dominant that it could not be replaced by the relationship between Beijing and other cities. However, after the founding of the People’s Republic of China, Beijing sought to reclaim all positions Tianjin had occupied to restore its former status and position. Since then, the relationship between Beijing and Tianjin has become a contradiction in terms, with Beijing and Tianjin each becoming a sprawling metropolis, suffering from various metropolitan diseases and downgrading in status. The Jingjinji Cooperative Development Plan was proposed to solve this problem. Its main focus was on integrating Tongzhou as a sub-center into Beijing and undertaking large-scale development in Xiong’an New Area to decentralize Beijing’s non-capital functions. As a result, Tianjin, which had long monopolized the traditional relationship of interdependence with Beijing, now had to compete with Tongzhou and Xiong’an New Area. For this reason, the work of Tianjin’s local historians and cultural and artistic practitioners to actively remember and recall modern Tianjin becomes a symbolic activity that creates a crack in the centripetal force of the Jingjinji Cooperative Development Plan’s inclusive, collective memory project.