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squares were more spirited attempts to render a central town church and a
common square. Campanella describes Luo Dian as a “Neo-Nordic” reinter-
pretation of Sweden's oldest town, Sigtuna, founded in 980 (Luo Dian's
manmade lake is based on Sigtuna's Lake Mälare).
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For good measure, the
developers threw in monuments from Iceland and Denmark, replicas of the
Althingi (Iceland's parliament), and a copy of the Little Mermaid statue.
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I
didn't see these replicas, but I did see statues of naked children playing and
in free repose, with inscriptions at their bases reading “Hope” and
“Expectation.”
Hassenpfl üg, who gave his grudging stamp of approval to An Ting, was
far more scathing about Luo Dian, which he describes as “a travesty of the
Chinese city. h e satellite city is Chinese. Its centre is dressed in Scandina-
vian clothes. h at's about it.”
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I would amend that Luo Dian is undressed in
Scandinavian clothes. Here, nudity is the new element that makes the
nature/nation dyad even kinkier. In other words, nature and freedom are the
dyads here, in contrast to An Ting's heavy reliance on carbon-esque images
and descriptions of highly technical advances.
But, despite the thrill of the promise of Scandinavian sexual promiscuity
in the pastoral landscape, Luo Dian was pretty empty. Like Zhu Jia Jiao, the
other environmental-themed development (near the region's famous
ancient “water towns”), Luo Dian is a famous historical site. It was the loca-
tion of an epic battle, the proverbial last stand before the Japanese invaded in
1937. h e carnage and intensity of the battle earned Luo Dian the moniker
“the grinding mill of fl esh and blood.”
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Despite their three-to-one troop
advantage, the Chinese were hampered by superior Japanese fi repower.
More than 50 percent of the Chinese troops were killed, and after Luo Dian
was lost, the Japanese takeover of Shanghai was inevitable.
h e stains of the past have been washed away by the supposed ecological
freedoms of the Northern Europeans and the glorifi cation of other invaders
in faraway countries. It's not di' cult to imagine why real estate developers
