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Towards a New Criticism on Architecture of Contemporary China:The Case of He Jingtang (1938-)Jianfei ZhuUniversity of MelbourneContemporary architectural criticism in China, as it becomes increasingly international, begins to privilege the individual – the creative hero who designs and writes. In the history of architecture of China however, such a creative figure arises only recently and still doesn’t quite reflect the whole picture. Yet the figure is predominant today, in the new criticism that speaks often to the west where the individual has been at the centre for a long time. In other words, this privileging of the individual appears to be a western bias enacted by the Chinese to match a prevalent western practice. But the reality in China, which sees an overwhelming part of the design production being carried out by the collective teams in design firms and characteristically ‘design institutes’, calls for a critique of the new ‘individualistic’ criticism. A restructuring is needed, to pay attention to social mechanism of design production in which the collective and the individual-collective dynamic feature prominently.Following from this, a sociological framing of criticism of architecture of China is needed. We may refer to Tafuri who has advised us to do so. But such an advice originates from a broader move towards socio-political history of design of which we must be aware.A new orientation also calls for a geographical awareness. There are now more discussions on architects of Taiwan and Hong Kong in China. To accentuate a geographical sensitivity, we need to examine local difference. Equally, we need to study Korea and Japan and other places, so that a grounded and textured picture of design practice of China and the region may be obtained.This paper argues for a new criticism that examines a collective mechanism, an institutional framing, and a geo-regional differentiation. It is tested in a study of He Jingtang (1938-), especially his institutional setup and its intellectual lineage in the southern city of Guangzhou.&#160;Jianfei Zhu holds a BArch from Tianjin University and a PhD from the Bartlett (UCL). He has been teaching since 1993 in the UK and Australia. He has delivered some 70 guest lectures worldwide at institutions including GSD/Harvard, MIT, AA, the Berlage, Vienna Architectural Centre, UC Berkeley, NUS, HKU , CAA and Tsinghua. He has worked on spatial politics of imperial Beijing, on critical episodes of modern Chinese architecture, on cases of contemporary Chinese architecture, as well as issues of criticality and post-criticality. Methodologically has worked on the theories/methods concerning space-power relations, spatial politics, visibility, form, design, aspects of Marxist and critical theory, China-west comparison, ethics of statehood etc.