Delight: China's long overdue debut at the Venice Biennale was a surprisingly thoughtful reflection on tradition and modernity.

China, that monstrous elephant in the living room of contemporary architectural practice and discourse, made its long awaited debut at this year's Venice Biennale, exploring how traditional Chinese culture might inflect and impact on the breakneck expansion of modern cities. In view of China's dash to embrace the worst aspects of capitalist development (short term planning, the dismal execution of building projects and wholescale razing of historic structures), this might seem like a laughably lost cause, but amid the hubris and chaos a number of talented young Chinese architects and urbanists are trying valiantly to nurture a sense of responsibility towards culture, society and the built environment.

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Among these are architect Wang Shu and artist Xu Jiang, whose work both inspired and featured in the Chinese pavilion. One of the advantages of being a Biennale arriviste is that you can actually design and make your own temporary building rather than being stuck with decorating an existing structure. And so, behind the great sheds of the Arsenale in the appropriately named Giardini delle Vergini, the Chinese constructed a gently inclined slope clad in recycled clay tiles and partly bisected by a promenading ramp. From a distance, it looked like a building that had slowly sunk in the Venetian mire, its roof the only reminder of its presence, yet among the conspicuous gee-whizzery of some this year's pavilion offerings the effect was of dignified sobriety and contemplative reflection, a particular balm to the souls of bemused visitors and frazzled journalists on hectic press schedules.

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Inside, installations by Wang Shu focused on a five year analysis of Chicheng, a historic Chinese town just north of Beijing, examining how the demands of rapacious modernity and the lessons of the past need not be mutually exclusive, a theme further explored in paintings by Xu Jiang. It was an assured and thoughtful debut and offers some hope that China can perhaps see beyond the all-consuming maelstrom of its current Great Leap Forward.