Monthly Archives: July 2005

The Buji Crossing

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A few days ago, I went to the Buji crossing, one of seven border crossings internal to the Shenzhen municipality. This border is called the 2nd line (二线), and divides Shenzhen into the Special Economic Zone (SEZ) and Baoan and Longgang Districts. Buji is one of Shenzhen’s major manufacturing areas. It is also a center of migrant laborers, who either work in Buji, or enter the SEZ at Buji. So it is an area filled with semis and buses, as goods and people are hauled from one place to another.

Buji is one of those places where I viscerally feel the contradiction between vague research commitments to, if not the truth, then at least some version of the whole story and my bodily aesthetics. Here, goods and people clog the area, pressing into my skin and I inhale carbon monoxide and sweat. I walk quickly past numerous terminals where thin, sun-darkened men load and unload semis, while rural migrants get off long-distance buses carrying bulging plastic bags and dragging wheeled suitcases. Some stare back at me and my camera remains dormant; I am embarrassed to be seen observing what many would rather hide, or failing that, disavow. Along these streets, women hawk fruit, prepared foods, and bottled drinks. Venders and homeless migrants have variously occupied the areas under pedestrian overpasses; these spaces stink of rotting foods and urine and I find myself wondering if there are any public bathrooms nearby. Is it possible to bathe or defecate in private? I notice children working beside adults and am reminded that many of my students are in summer school, already preparing for next semester’s tests. I have come to take photos, but find it difficult to stop and pose my objects because I want to be already beyond the crowded heat and stench. Instead, I snap a photo here and there, refusing to meet anyone’s gaze, moving determinedly forward. I am reduced from methodological exposition to shamed confession. Such are the lessons of the Buji crossing. Continue reading →

huanggang road: economies of scale

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This afternoon I walked along Huanggang Road, which runs along a north-south axis, from the Hong Kong border (at Huanggang) to Shenzhen’s North Loop road. The North Loop connects up with Buji (one of Shenzhen’s manufacturing centers, located just beyond the SEZ’s border in Longgang District) and then on to Guangzhou by way of Dongguan. Although less well known than Shenzhen and Guangzhou, Dongguan is a major manufacturing center.

The point is that everyday, hundreds of semis pass back and forth along Huanggang Road, hauling containers full of goods from Shenzhen, Dongguan, and Guangzhou and then returning from Hong Kong for another load. I’m told that with turn around time at the border, its possible for drivers to make two trips a day. These containers are then loaded on to ships in Hong Kong and shipped throughout the world. (Just last week, I led a group of Shenzhen students on a study trip to England, where they amused themselves looking for souvenirs “made in China”.)

The drivers are licensed in both Hong Kong and Shenzhen, although the trucks are designed to drive on the left side of the road, British style. They rumble past housing developments from about 6 a.m. to midnight. At rush hour, they make Shenzhen’s already clogged streets even more impassible, squeezing traffic into the safety lanes and causing more impatient drivers into mid-stream k-turns to get off Huanggang Road. Bikers continue to weave fearlessly through the mess.

I have had difficulty representing these semis because they stretch beyond my line of sight, precluding a total image. Yet up close, they seem formless, sheets of metal that are themselves the reason the horizon stops just off the sidewalk. When not forming an inadvertent convoy, they growl past pedestrians, shaking the earth and burping up carbon monoxide. Commuters, waiting at Huanggang bus stops, cover their noses and mouths with their sleeves or handkerchiefs; some wear surgical masks, which they remove once on the bus.

It is at this level, that “global flows of production” have become tangible to me. I have been to the ports, where containers pile one on top of another, and have read reports about so much tonnage a year passing from China to the world by way of Hong Kong, but those figures remain too abstract. Crossing the street, inhaling carbon monoxide for several blocks, listening to the engines rev—these have made visceral the feel of mass production, the ways in which manufacturing, importing, and exporting goods are not simply a matter of economy, but also choices about the kind of world in which we want to live. The containers moving along Huanggang Road constitute my backyard.

These images of claypot on Huanggang Road remain awkward, out of balance, and I think its because my claypot and even three semis do not belong to the same representational scale. Reason enough to re-consider the world being made in China; my life plays out at claypot scale (in a manner of speaking) and yet I am trying to imagine, understand, and evaluate a world in which thousands of containers, semis, and ships pass by daily. If I can’t make this imaginative leap from where I am, what can I know about this world? More to the point, to what extent does the irritating lack of balance in these images actualize more than a cognitive inability to grasp where I am, but rather the impossibility of making semis part of a human world?

和谐深圳：building a harmonious society

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Yesterday, I was walking in one of the new sections of Houhai. On my left, behind the walls of an elite gated community, children frolicked in a recently completed swimming pool. On my right, migrant workers hung out at a corner kiosk of a construction site shantytown. The juxtaposition of these two spaces, common throughout Shenzhen, symbolizes the class structure that has enabled the construction of the city. On the one hand, urban residents (whether from other cities or long term Shenzhen residents) occupy the new buildings and spaces—upscale housing, high-rise offices, and shopping malls bulging with designer goods. On the other hand, rural migrants build these spaces, inhabiting temporary structures that vanish at the end of a project. Indeed, it is not uncommon to see children playing or women cooking in front of a row of construction site shanties. Unlike the enclosed lives of the gated community, shantytown lives spill into the street, disrupting the flow of traffic. Then, they vanish and the street takes on the “normal (正常)” appearence of a residential neighborhood.

When I first came to Shenzhen, well-meaning urbanites repeatedly warned me that life in Shenzhen was “disorderly (好乱)” and “complex (复杂)”. Moreover, they explicitly attributed urban crime to outsiders (外来人), who were ineligible for household residence in Shenzhen and therefore thought to lack “emotion (感情)” for the city. In fact, one of the more interesting themes running through conversations about Shenzhen has been whether or not a person can feel attached to a place that isn’t their hometown. Much is at stake in this question: how and when do residents self-identify as “Shenzheners” rather than as sojourners from other places? But back to questions about disorderly and complex living conditions. Ten years after my arrival, urbanites continue to issue warnings about walking in Shenzhen. And although I have never been robbed (I have “lost” several bicycles, but that’s another matter), my friends continue to worry for my safety. They are convinced that foreigners present a ready target to unscrupulous outsiders. When I ask if they feel safe in the city, they usually reply, “yes”, but then add, “you can’t be too careful”. And I wonder if this “you” means me-in-particular or one-in-general…

Signs of an underlying anxiety also permeate the built environment. In addition to taking precautions before going out, Shenzhen residents build gated communities, enforce community walls with barbed wire, and hire security guards. Security walls are also built around construction sites. Recently, I have noticed advertisements for private eyes (私人侦探) throughout the city. These advertisements are spray painted on walls throughout the city, as well as onto sidewalks and telephone booths. I’ve posed my found objects with these signs of anxiety–a first attempt at a dialogue with the built environment Shenzhen about terms of inhabitation. Some of these signs of anxiety are now online.

Officially, Shenzhen has not commented on the question of public safety. However, there have been indirect references to the matter; Shenzhen’s leaders are vigorously promoting the idea of “harmonious society (和谐社会)”. This slogan also links up with national concerns. Under Jiang Zemin, the Party emphasized a policy of “using morality to govern the country (以德治国)”. Hu Jintao’s administration has continued to deploy revamped Confucianism to exhort citizens to participate in capitalist reforms, offering the slogan “harmonious society (和谐社会)” as a collective goal. Given the class differences and concomitant social tensions that characterize even walking down the street in Shenzhen, “you” feel the importance and desirability of such a society.

in lieu of a methods section–thoughts prompted by found objects

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We are in the midst of an unseasonable rainy season, which has pleasantly cooled the city, but also taught me the desirability of an indoor studio. Yesterday, I played with my found objects on the balcony, deliberately arranging them instead of posing them in different parts of the city. I’m not pleased with the images and (in a moment of irrepresible personification) suspect that the objects themselves felt awkward.

To date, I have gleaned the following objects from rubbish heaps (in chronological order): Teapot, Claypot, Bicycle Tire, Umbrella, and The Gloves. I was given Bench. I found Teapot while wandering around the Houhai land reclamation area. Claypot had been left behind an old (and soon to be razed) village. I found Bicycle Tire next to a bridge and Umbrella had been stuffed into an advertising billboard in Dongmen. The Gloves had been abandoned on granite rocks at the subway construction site, just next to Diwang. Bench came from Zhuhai, the Special Economic Zone on the western banks of the Pearl River Delta, just north of Macau.

Until I began collecting discarded objects and photographing them throughout the city, I had contented myself with photographing the city. Photographing the city was both a moral-aesthetic and documentary practice. On the one hand, I have enjoyed reframing the city; Shenzhen is not a conventionally beautiful city (no elegantly classic ruins, no early modern architecture, and a penchant for razing mountains and filling in coastline). Consequently, it has taken me time to learn how to see it, without immediately turning from its more obvious problems. This aesthetic repugnance embodied (and continues to embody) a moral position; my refusal to look, to recognize how the city materializes the daily lives of its inhabitants has constituted a refusal to witness those lives. A refusal, in other words, to acknowledge the value of those lives simply because I don’t like the way the city looks.

(It would be fascinating to track forms of disdain for Shenzhen to specify how refusing to witness Shenzhen enables folks—anthropologists, businessmen, migrant workers—to variously use but not inhabit the city, increasing the levels of alienation that most seem to feel here. The most common refusals to acknowledge Shenzhen that I have heard are “Shenzhen isn’t China” or “Shenzhen doesn’t have any history/culture”. However, it also takes the form of apologetics for “the cost of progress”, or a reduction of this history to theoretical abstractions. I am fluent in all of these dialects, but in my scholarly work have demonstrated a preference to use theoretical abstractions to obscure unacknowledged disdain.)

On the other hand, the speed of transformation has eluded my attempts to write this history and photography has provided a form of documentary shorthand. There is a saying in Shenzhen, “Plans don’t keep up with change (计划跟不上变化)”. Various interpretations of this phrase are possible. Things got built here before the city plan was approved (so plans come into being already obsolete); positioning for short-term economic advantage, rather than consideration for long-term growth have fueled these changes (so ad-hoc improvisation, rather than deliberate follow-through tends to characterize decision-making); intensifying production (low pay, long working days, and keeping things running 24-hours a day by maintaining multiple shifts) has continuously increased the speed of economic growth (so the city has to handle increasing amounts of objects); migration to the city has exceeded efforts to build the city (so there is constant adaptation of places and things for unplanned uses).

The phrase “plans don’t keep up with change” points to Shenzhen’s ephemeral nature; this really isn’t the same city it was twenty years ago, or ten years ago, or even six months ago, for that matter. As Marx warned us, all that is solid melts into air. After ten years of attempting to write an ethnography about Shenzhen, I have instead started to examine the process of my own intellectual obsolescence. Photographs provide a means of grappling with these changes; I return to a site, retrace my steps, and click. (This is not the same as saying that photographs resolve the problem of representing change. I’m grappling, remember.)

The process of photographing these Found Objects (and scanning an area for interesting rubbish) has rearticulated my moral-aesthetic and documentary concerns. Suddenly, I have been able to engage simultaneously both fragments of everyday life and the changing landscape. Moreover, these common objects have helped me to witness Shenzhen, and I am often surprised by how beautiful the city can look, if only momentarily. Placing an object requires me to engage what I have learned to overlook. I have also found that placing an object makes details more apparent. When photographing the city, I have tended to look at representative architecture and the organization of space. In contrast, the Found Objects set off details, activating the spaces between as much as the elements of the built environment. In future posts, I will take up each of the objects in turn. I’m still wondering if I should highlight the object (a series of photographs of Teapot, for example, throughout the city), or the place (a series of different objects photographed at one place, like the Houhai land reclamation area).

Perhaps skies will clear in the afternoon and I will be able to take The Gloves out on a shoot. The Gloves suit both ethical and methodological considerations. In addition to directly representing those who have built and maintained the city as inhabitable spaces, the gloves don’t weigh all that much. This characteristic opens all sorts of possibilities; I can take out The Gloves with any other object without considering getting on and off the bus (no added bulk), organizing my backpack (no danger of cracking a porcelain object), or putting them safely away after each shoot (can be stuffed into jeans pockets).

The Gloves’ charms become apparent in comparison to Bench. This past week, when not dodging raindrops, I have been telling myself that Bench really isn’t heavy, and that carrying him on a two-hour walk under a brutal sun will result in satisfying images. I expect I shall succumb to these exhortations sometime after I return from England, where I will be leading a two-week study trip. In the meantime, however, I have enjoyed whipping Gloves out of my packback and not fearing that I shall harm them in any irreparable way. Teapot fell off a pedestrian overpass about ten days ago, and I still miss her.

Found Object portraits online.

haunting images–houhai land reclamation

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I’m having difficulty thinking about these images. I took them about two and half years ago with my first digital camera, which wasn’t a high resolution instrument and for some reason the fuzziness of these pictures bothers me. I look at them and see “unreliable camera” rather than “artsy interpretation”, but that perhaps is part of the point of this post (that and the dangers of alliteration.) The challenge of documenting Shenzhen has been not simply that the place in question constantly changes or even that that how I see Shenzhen has also changed, but the moral, political, and aesthetic evaluations that I make about these changes have also been twisting themselves into new and often unrecognizable forms. One of the more immediate consequences of all this change (or at least my most pressing concern du jour) is that it’s often difficult to squeeze those past images into today’s project, which (if I’m honest) is more often than not what happened when I was distracted from what I thought I was doing in the earlier photographs.

To contextualize subsequent musings about images of land reclamation in Shenzhen, it might be useful to check out two other sites. First, the scale of these changes can be grasped by watching the time-series satellite images of environmental transformation in the Pearl River Delta. As the image zooms from a picture of the world toward Shenzhen, you will note that the municipality is located in the southeast of China, just north of Hong Kong. (Future posts will include much about the various border crossings and ideas about connections, contacts, and enforced exclusions, for the moment, however, I’m sticking to the point of land reclamation. Although, I do wonder about the point of a post in which most of the information has been placed in parantheses…) Second, you can look at a more detailed map of Shenzhen. (This map is in Chinese. I haven’t yet found a decent English map of Shenzhen on-line. If you, gentle reader happen to know of one, please let me know. Also at this site, you can view a version of the 1996-2010 Shenzhen Urban Plan.) There are six districts in Shenzhen: (from east to west at the Hong Kong border) Yantian, Luohu, Futian, Nanshan and (from east to west just north of these districts) Longgang and Baoan. The Nantou Penisula juts out into the Pearl River in the western region of the city (Nanshan District), just south of the airport (there should be an icon). If you zoom in, you will see the area that has been designated for reclamation. The western passageway linking Shenzhen to Hong Kong is also noted on this map (it should be finished sometime next year).

Now the question that haunts me is “other than measuring change, (which the folks at NASA seem to be doing quite well), what’s the point of these images?” Is change in and of itself what’s interesting? Or is the point the goals we think we’re pursuing through efforts to direct (inevitable) change? What does it mean to witness transformation? In these earlier pictures, I was interested in the scale of change, the kinds of inequality that I saw as coming into being with the new landscape, the leveling of the coastline, and the incongruous placement of a desert, where there had once been oyster and big-head fish farms. I’m still interested in these issues, but they are now differently encoded in the landscape. It is more difficult to find traces of massive land reclamation because most of that work is done. Those who visit Houhai today encounter real estate developers, newly laid roads, and Mangrove Park, a lovely coastline park, while the squatters that once occupied the land created out of buried fish farms have been pushed elsewhere. What’s more, much of the undeveloped land has been either cordoned off into construction sites or hidden behind imported topiary.

Perhaps I’m trying to say that these images capture something that no longer exists today. These displacements–of people and fish and water and earth–constitute an invisible history. Yet this invisibility is different from the invisibility of bikes and bikers, where I had learned to see them but not register their presence in my world. Here, the invisibility of those other landscapes has to do with absences, deliberately created or not. Buried fish, unlike harried water deliverymen, will not crash into my consciousness as I walk to school. The previous coastline is gone. I pose a teapot on a bench at the new border, which from a distance, looks almost like the old border, which is itself a measure of the relative economic states of Shenzhen and Hong Kong. (In a nutshell, Shenzhen’s booming and Hong Kong has settled into slow growth.) A story of death, in other words. Or perhaps, more acurately a ghost story. Shenzhen haunts me. And that’s the rub. As an anthropologist, I have been trained to write dissertations, not ghost stories. I look at traces of past encounters with Shenzhen, these pictures or hastily scribbled fieldnotes in deteriorating notebooks, and have difficulty thinking about them. But thinking may be the problem. Watching Houhai, I have learned both the unreliability of documentation and the sadness of witnessing what still feels like needless destruction. Is this sensibility itself the ethnographic object?

A friend and poet, Steven Schroeder has taught me much about the intellectual rigor of story-telling. His poem, “Fish” written after a walk on reclaimed Houhai, poignantly evokes these ghosts and their fragile existence. Thank you.

Fish

dying, gasp
at the bottom of the air
for water.

City, rising
on dry bones, gasps
at the bottom
of heaven
for air.

For more of Steve’s poetry, please visit his site.

land-filled houhai, bird’s eye view, jul 6, 2003

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a first attempt at contextualizing subsequent musings about images of houhai land reclamation.

the overlooked ubiquity of bicycles in shenzhen

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I have been collecting discarded objects and then photographing them in different sections of Shenzhen, the oldest and largest of China’s special economic zones. This process has (as yet) denied me photo-ops with a Guanyin statue, but helped me see things so common that they hadn’t previously registered as “Shenzhenese”. This bike tire examplifies how what gets overlooked is often the all-too-common (even by folks who define themselves through acts of documentation).

In the early eighties, just after the PRC had opened to the capitalist West, bicycles symbolized the differences between urban China and urban “us”. I remember magazine articles on Beijing and Shanghai that featured images of hundreds of Chinese citizens biking to (or from) work, school, the market. At the time, Shenzhen had just been established and rarely featured in these articles, except as an example of the extent to which China was changing. From its establishment, however, Shenzhen pursued modernization with an eye to non-Chinese cities. Accordingly, the Shenzhen urban plan deliberately excluded bicycle lanes; Shenzhen’s modernity would be defined by car ownership. I’ve heard that by the mid-1990s, per capita car ownership in Shenzhen had surpassed that of Hong Kong. Certainly, the total number of vehicles cruising Shenzhen streets has surpassed the number in Hong Kong. Nevertheless, bicycles remain a common mode of transportation in the city. Many workers still bike and many business depend upon bicycle delivery. Indeed, throughout the city, usually nestled under an overpass, individuals set up bicycle repair shops. For one or two renminbi, a tire puncture can be repaired, breaks tightened, or chains oiled.

Given their exclusion from the urban plan, bikers often compete with pedestrians for passageways through the city. I have often bumped into bikes or been bumped as bikers rush to their next destination. Nevertheless, I didn’t associate bikes with the city. If I’m any example of how folks have come to inhabit Shenzhen, then the municipality’s urban planners have successfully banished bikes and bikers from mental maps of the city. Or rather, bikes and bikers crash into our consciousness only to the extent that they interrupt normal traffic. All this to say that I have been in Shenzhen for ten years, and am just starting to realize how vast the overlooked landscape might be and how misleading these pictures probably are. Consider them evidence of an emerging awarenss of, rather than reliable data about Shenzhen. Pictures, here.