Chang'an Avenue is the main east–west thoroughfare that cuts through Beijing immediately south of the imperial Forbidden City and forming the north edge of the revolutionary Tian'anmen Square. Most visitors to the city will encounter it, but few will appreciate it as the Avenue of Eternal Peace or recognize it as the Number One Avenue in the Divine Land. By comparison with European cities it is wide, perhaps ungainly, and is lined with bulky and, to Western eyes, architecturally undistinguished institutional buildings. It is, at first glance, unmemorable. However, Shuishan Yu, makes a compelling case for considering it as one of the world's most significant streets, if not, like the Champs Elysées, on its architectural and urbanistic merits, then by showing what it tells us about the evolution of post-imperial and in particular, post-revolutionary China, about how China presents itself to the world, and, most revealingly, about how China contrives its self-image.

Chang'an Avenue is not part of old Beijing, but a post-revolutionary invention. There were streets running east and west that, after the revolution, were connected up, realigned, widened and extended, removing historic gates and the single-storey hutongs that characterize central Beijing. The width grew from barely 15 metres to 80 (they had planned for 120+) and it cut across the whole city: imagine a super-wide Oxford Street connecting the Rainham Marshes in the east to Heathrow in the west in one sweep across London. Like much in China, the making of Chang'an Avenue has been a gigantic project.

Not only was the connecting up new, so was the idea of having what in the west we would call an east–west “axis.” Like other traditional Chinese cities, Beijing is built with a north–south centre-line that runs through the Forbidden City – a line of meaning and significance connecting the buildings and their courtyards – but this is not as an ‘axis’ in the Western sense of a major ceremonial route.

Shuishan Yu tells of the creation of the avenue to structure a series of other stories that interweave. There is the story of the changing role of architecture and town-planning in the service of the new China; the story of political imperatives, slogans and decision making; the story of the ideological disputes about architectural style, and behind all this, of the changing relationship between the ideal of the countryside to the idea of the city. Chang'an Avenue here is the backcloth to the life of the city and the major events that have helped shape it. It was Chang'an Avenue that saw the bloody climax in June 1989 of the so-called “Tian'anmen Square” movement.

The story of stylistic debates is here, but the author does not dwell on the nuances of particular buildings. Instead he provides the political context against which the stylistic battle lines were drawn, to trace the shifting use of stylistic descriptors such as “modern,” “national,” “Western,” “contemporary,” “traditional,” and later “post-modern,” charting the rise and fall of “the big roof.” A parallel narrative tells the story of China's exhibition politics played out on the avenue in the Museum of Chinese History where history is periodically remade by changing the exhibits, inventing and reinventing their significance. The changing displays, and the debates about style, are revised every decade.

At the collapse of the Qing dynasty, architecture and planning in China was predominantly the work of foreigners, based in the concessionary ports. A Chinese architectural profession was imported, particularly through a group of influential young students who left China a century ago to study at the University of Pennsylvania, the most pure and most French of the Beaux Arts schools of architecture and the academic home of Louis Kahn. The most influential of the group, Liang Sicheng, became professor of architecture at Tsinghua University where he led teams to measure and draw China's historical and traditional architecture, rendering and publishing them in the Beaux Arts manner. And he led teams of his staff and students in preparing plan after plan for Chang'an Avenue in the post-revolutionary period.

With the rise to power of the People's Republic the driver for design sprang from the organization of labour: professional and manual. Architecture was swept up in the great leap forward but, while the disastrous outcomes of the great leap in agriculture and industry have been largely buried in China's own history, the great leap in architecture continues. As Shuishan Yu explains, the “rapidity of design and construction were convenient measurable demonstrations of achievement” (p. 83). Sixty years on, and despite regular stylistic shifts, the principles of architecture's great leap are still driving the urbanization of the new China. In architecture and urbanism, the great leap is still leaping.