Category Archives: noted

what has shenzhen’s significance been in post mao china?

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To celebrate the 30th anniversary of the establishment of Shenzhen, Shenzhen TV uploaded a survey on significant events in the SEZ’s early history. Of the 23 Shenzhen firsts, site visitors were asked to vote on the ten most significant. The list is interesting for a variety reasons. One, it demonstrates the importance of Shenzhen in restructuring Chinese society after Mao. Two, it reminds us that many taken-for-granted elements of capitalist society had to be introduced and cultivated. Three, it reminds us that much of what once made Shenzhen “special” is now “common” and many recent policy decisions must be seen as efforts to regain competitive advantage (in the absence of preferential policies). Four, it shows the voting results, allowing visitors to get a sense of how others have evaluated this history. Below, a synopsis of the list.

1. On June 8, 1983 the Shenzhen Baoan County Cooperative Shareholding Company issued “Shen Bao An”, the first stock issued since the founding of the PRC. Continue reading →

of dreams and consumption…

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another couplet from real estate advertising, this one noted because it suggests the poetic contours of consumption: 梦想的产品，现实的冲动 (a dreamy product, a practical impulse) as if impulse buying were about satisfying dreams, rather than putting ourselves in debt. after all, the cheapest 30 sq meter condo started at 380,000 rmb, well over the minimum wage. what’s more this relatively cheap development is located in dongguan, a long ride from downtown shenzhen. so to buy into the dream one needs an upper management salary and a car. sigh.

what is luxury living?

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I’ve been thinking about luxury because it permeates Shenzhen advertising, especially that for new housing estates. The definition of luxury that appears in these advertisements invariably links high-end consumption, images of happy elites, and the idea of homecoming. The strip of reclaimed land that stretches from Shekou Gongye 8 Road to Dongjiaotou, for example, is thick with malls and advertising, as well as littered with evidence that such lives don’t come cheap.

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The characters for luxury 奢侈 reveal the extent to which inequality threads through and often sustains our desire for these objects. 奢 deconstructs to the characters 大者, or “big one”. Likewise, 侈 becomes 人多, or many people. Thus, the literal definition of shechi is big one many people, leaving the question of the verb that links big ones and the many open to interpretation. Is a luxury item something that all want but belongs to the big one? Or perhaps, it takes many to produce a big one?  Continue reading →

梧桐山：poetry in the world

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Climbing Wutong Mountain, actions speak, names resonate, and language, well, language fails us.

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environmental upgrades and other ironies

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The Futian River has been channelized into a rainwater runoff and waste streams. The rainwater flows above ground, creating a walking area, which winds through the Municipality’s central park. The waste stream flows through underground tubes, unseen and unnoticed, unless one manages to the wastewater treatment center further downstream. The effect of separating the streams has been to create a cleaner environment, literally burying the problem.

Now, whether or not a Shenzhen river can be separated into rainwater runoff and wastewater tubes depends on the level of industrialization upstream. Thus, for example, the City efficiently handled the relatively underdeveloped Yantian River (in the East), while remains undecided about what to do with the Buji River. Consequently, lest we forget that water quality remains an issue throughout the city, upon crossing the silvery clean Futian River into Tianmian, one encounters literally hundreds of plastic bottles of drinking water.

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Reflexive Anthropology, yes??

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Over the course of a year, we live so many lives it seems simultaneously naive and cynical to claim that we are always the same, demanding constancy of ourselves and others. In terms of knowledge production, those lives intersect and abut and transform each other despite housekeeping efforts to maintain distinctions between private and public, rational and sentimental, emic and etic, the known and everything else. So, rather than end 2011 by reviewing other people’s lives and events of global importance, instead I’m offering a facebookish mash-up my 2011. Glimpses of the sharing that has made my year possible and thus created conditions of possibility for writing Noted, situating knowledge, below.

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Photographing transformation

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For those interested in the transformation of Shenzhen, the city has a wonderful assortment of documentary photographers, six of whom have been featured in the China Insights Exhibition. The impulse to document the city’s transformation is shared by many and seems, along with design, one of the primary forms of art in the city. Indeed, the popularity of documentary representation often seems a symptom of the velocity at which the city changes, as if, by documenting we might make sense of the change. Certainly, I document obsessively. Sites worth a visit:

Jia Yuchuan (贾玉川) made his name photographing Shenzhen’s transvestite culture.

Yu Haibo (余海波) has been photographing the city and its residents since 1989.

Zhang Xinmin (张新民) has been photographing migrant workers since 1988.

suddenly smog…

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Yesterday, blue skies, today notably grey, so I asked a cabbie what he thought was the reason. Many cars. More than yesterday? Well, he said, in the north they call it mist, but here we call it smog. He nodded. That’s why visibility is so poor today. Too many cars.

临摹：When is a copy not a copy?

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This November, I was an assistant for the OCAT international art residency program, through which I met artists Frank Haermans and Thomas Adebahr, the artist collective of Nika Oblak and Primoz Novak, as well as curator Paula Orrell. Together, they put up the show Future Relevance, or as we translated it “明天，谁说了算？”

Interacting with the artists and curators was interesting because it inspired me to think differently about my own forays into creative ethnography and forms of representation that engage different (and frankly) wider audiences. In particular, Thomas Adebahr’s earlier work, The Benjamin Project (shown at Gallery Diet) had me thinking about contemporary art conventions that value some forms of copying and reduce other forms to “labor” albeit “skilled”. The question, of course is: how do we move across and between these social structures to create meaningful dialogue about human creativity? Continue reading →

Christmas thoughts

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This Christmas, while wandering through spaces decorated for Christmas parties and romance, I realized that in Shenzhen, Christmas is a night of countdowns and parties  because folks here think about Christmas as “western new year”. My Chinese friends and many others use associated festivities as means of making new intimacies, rather than confirming old intimacies, which is what they do at Chinese New Year’s. So last night, there were Christmas parties, romantic dinners, and declared intentions; today, I will go to a spa with friends and then have dinner at another friend’s house.

I’m not sure how many圣诞节s I have now spent in Shenzhen, however, I remain both dazed by interpretations of how Christmas might be celebrated in the total absence of religiosity and also overwhelmed by the kindness people have shown me because they know how hard it is to be away from family on days when we remember and assert intimate belonging. Alas, it is far too easy to reduce Chinese Christmas celebrations to another excuse to sell decorations and presents that didn’t get shipped to western markets, especially, when less than ten years ago people were still asking me which was more important, Christmas or Halloween? Nevertheless, today, I’m remembering that any shared holiday potentially exceeds our cynicism and yes, offers the chance of mutual redemption precisely because we gather.

Happy holidays.