Bill Sewell, Constructing Empire: The Japanese in Changchun, 1905-45

The Japanese vassal state of Manchukuo in the 1930s may seem an unlikely site for the implementation of a daring modernist experiment in urban planning and architecture but, as Bill Sewell’s Constructing Empire reveals, the Japanese invaders were determined to use their new regional capital of Xinjing, adjacent to the old Chinese city and treaty port of Changchun, as a manifestation of the modernising Japanese state within the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. That the Japanese experime...