Category Archives: noted

千里求缘 – desperate fates

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Text of a personal add that I discovered stuck on a building wall outside the second line:

Seeking Shared Destiny

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The [principals in this] advertisement are represented by a lawyer’s office, they have already notarized [documents], the lady has already deposited 1.3 million rmb in escrow. This information is true, reliable, and guaranteed by a lawyer.

Commercial registration number: 08778955     Document number: 09121206

JIANG Xiaoyan, 28 years old, 1.65 meters, white skin, married to a wealthy Hong Kong businessman. Due to her husband’s infertility, she is unable to conceive a child. Worried that there is no one to inherit her extensive property and in order to avoid disputes, she is using the pretext of visiting relatives [in the Mainland] to find a caring, healthy, and upright young man to impregnate her. If she and the man reach an agreement during a phone negotiation, she will transfer a 300,000 rmb deposit [to your account], arrange a meeting with you, and then send 1 million rmb to you upon having a positive pregnancy test. This will not adversely influence your family, and lawyers will be responsible for maintaining secrecy. (You must call yourself, text messages will not be answered, don’t bother replying if you’re not sincere).

158 XXXX XXXX

impressions of shenzhen north station

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Visited the new Shenzhen North Station (深圳北站) and it is as overwhelming as intended (my friend said that he had heard that the city aimed to construct the best train station in Asia, and then when I mentioned this description to another friend, he commented, “so it’s the largest in Asia, right?”) So yes, another complex of landmark buildings that seems to dissolve into the relentless shuffle of state of the art stadiums, ever-taller buildings, and more imposing public spaces and has me wondering if Shenzhen might be best experienced as an architectural museum – with all that such a characterization implies, including a general (global?) indifference to museum pieces except as collector’s items. Impressions below.

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qinghu – end of the line [du jour]

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Walked around the qinghu station, which for the moment, is the last station on the longhua line. in its underdevelopment, the area reminds us that Shenzhen’s “villages in the city (城中村)” began as “new villages (新村)”, as locals took advantage of their land, proximity to Hong Kong, and cheap labor to jump into global chains of production. Nevertheless, with the subway, bourgeois taste has begun to restructure the landscape and upscale housing developments now push Longhua factories and dormitories further inland. Pictures below.

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Utopian Shenzhen, 1978-1982

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Below I summarize thoughts about the importance of Shenzhen in shaping China’s post Mao utopianism.

In the heady rush of hyperbole, it is tempting to describe the SEZ’s first thiry years as the – Unprecidented! Miraculous! Epic! – jump of a lowly county from the lowest escholon in the state apparatus to one of the highest. More prosaically, the systemic re-invention of Baoan County as Shenzhen Municipality took place over a series of administrative adjustments and concomitant reallocation of authority, responsibilities, and fundamentally, rights to the national allocation of people, services, and goods. From 1978-1982, the Central Government and/or Guangdong Province restructured Baoan County four times. Each restructuring had a different ideological meaning and aimed to created a different form of post Mao utopia. These ideological differences – more precisely different understandings of the utopian content of modernization – continue to vex the development of Shenzhen.

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of smog, environmental and political

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As the Universiade closed, Shenzhen’s clear skies and bright sun caused a friend to jokingly speculate that, “Even Heaven is cooperating with the Municipal Government [to put on a great universiade]”. Nevertheless, a mere 24 hours after the Universiade closing ceremony, the smog was back. And yes, it rained yesterday, so there were cloudy grey skies, but. The smog is back.

Alas, the smog is not only environmental. I remain unclear as to why Longgang’s “Crystal (水晶石)” stadium not only lost the opening ceremony to Nanshan’s “Silkworm Cocoon (春茧),” but also lost the closing ceremony to the Window of the World theme park. Now, I can understand moving the opening ceremony to the Cocoon because the stadium has been explicitly heralded as the perfect match to Beijing’s Nest, allowing Shenzhen leaders to deploy universiade internationalism to assert the Municipality’s position within domestic politics。 However, why move the closing ceremony from a state of the art, technically cutting age sports stadium to an aging theme park? This decision baffles me.

According to closing ceremony directory, Luo Wei, the venue for the closing ceremony was moved six times and the program was changed 45 times. He expressed dismay at the process until Guangdong Provincial Party Committee Secretary, Wang Yang (汪洋) reminded him that the Window of the World theme park boasts beautiful reproductions of famous global tourist spots and that the closing ceremony would be a huge party for all Shenzhen’s international friends to go wild.

And there’s the rub. Shenzhen’s boosterism not withstanding, both the Central Government and Guangdong Province have participated in staging the Universiade and in that shuffle, Longgang District, which remains the poorest and least developed of Shenzhen’s Districts, lost the opportunity to take center stage in an international event. Nevertheless, they’re footing the bill for constructing the Olympic Village. Such are the inequalities of “face projects (面子工程)”. Sigh.

that was then

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Wandered over to the Shenzhen Bay sports stadium, where people took pictures of themselves in front of universiade installations and topiary. To give a sense of what is meant by “Shenzhen speed (深圳速度)”, I am posting pictures of that particular bit of earth, below.

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Importantly and often overlooked, hidden in plain sight behind painted walls and temporary green space, the bit of earth just south of the pageantry has gone to seed, awaiting post-universiade construction.

back online

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Back. And yes, coming into Hong Kong International Airport, I noticed the extensive advertising for the Universiade, more wonderfully, blue skies welcomed me. Limiting the number of cars in Shenzhen and shutting down factories makes the environment more beautiful. I am looking forward to walking the city over the next few days and enjoying clarity.

a facelift is only skin deep: dongmen

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Universiade facelifts continue and, along certain paths in the city – the global, neoliberal, middle class paths – one walks through rubble under tarps and past construction sites. Nevertheless, several steps off those intended tracks, life continues undisturbed by visions of what Shenzhen leaders think foreigners / outsiders should see. The effect of this selective construction is to further isolate pockets of working class ordinariness and transform it into unsightly poverty. In fact, one of the reasons urban villages are as such is because the city grew up around them, closing them in, and distorting their relationship to greater landscape. Thirty odd years ago, a village was a tight cluster of single story story houses and narrow paths in the midst of rice paddies, streams, orchards, and small docks that opened to either the Pearl River or the South China Sea; today an urban village is a tight cluster of three to eight story rentals that hum in the shadows of thirty story apartment complexes and postmodern skyscrapers even as the sea recedes.

Below, a walk through Dongmen, Hubei New Village, and Old Luohu work unit neighborhoods, begging the question: if what we see is what we get, why aren’t we learning to look more deeply?

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Shenzhen’s neoconfucian movement seeps into official discourse, again

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Last night at a bus stop, happened upon Shenzhen’s latest universiade campaign and yes, its Confucian quotes about welcoming guests and behaving in civilized fashion. The neoconfucian quotes are part of a larger campaign that is using the universiade to teach Shenzhen residents how to properly inhabit the city. In the subway, for example, posters show event mascot UU lining up and waiting his turn to get onto the subway. Elementary schools are teaching students to smile openly “in a western way” to great foreign guests in a friendly manners; indeed, in one of my favorite news stories, the Binhe Elementary principal explained the creation of the schools’ Smile Angels and then winning angels analyzed the characteristic that made their smile uniquely welcoming – sweet, like a bow, and so open I end up squinting.

This campaign deepens and expands upon popular neoconfucianism throughout Shenzhen. As mentioned in an earlier post, for example, some schools and many families require children to memorize the three character jing in order to cultivate filial and more intelligent children. The SEZ’s 30th Anniversary was also celebrated with Confucian quotes. I’ve also noticed that recent advertising campaigns have stepped up the filial piety quotient, moving from generalized “care for your parents by using our product” formulae to the following structure – a mother tries to help a son, the son rejects her help, and then discovers his mistake. Product placement underscores the twin moments of maternal care and the son’s enlightenment.

The Confucian Merchant (儒商) has long figured in Shenzhen public discourse about how the newly wealthy should behave, focusing on business ethics and philanthropic responsibility. Then came a grassroots movement among the middle class to teach children Confucian classics. However, the Universiade campaign underscores that the Municipality’s public discourse is growing even more explicitly neoconfucian, which in turn, points to the flexible soft side of municipal ideology and its intersections with culture and commerce – hegemony in the sense of unquestioned common sense.

大望: Culture Highland

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Yesterday, I visited the Dawang Culture Highland (大望文化高地). This is the second year that Dawang has been part of the Cultural Industries Fair; like Dafen, Dawang is using art and international art markets to urbanize. Unlike Dafen, however, Dawang is located at the foot of Wutong Mountain and is promoting a more natural and original art experience.

Dawang refers both to a particular village and the cluster of villages that nestle against the foot of Wutong Mountain and so development in the area tends to be village by village, leading to both unexpected convergences and contradictions. Importantly, the spatial layout of the area suggests interesting (if familiar) transitions between rural and urbane Shenzhen as well as the integration of neidi migrants and artists into the city. On the one hand, Maizai, for example, is the village closest to mountain footpaths and has developed a cobblestone pedestrian street for Shenzhen urbanites looking for weekend relaxation and local Hakka cuisine. Other villages specialize in selling lychee honey. There is limited, small scale production and commerce. On the other hand, transportation to the area is inconvenient, which means that land is cheap. Consequently, both artists and squatters have nestled into the edges of Dawang lychee orchards.

This layout highlights the important social function of urban villages in incubating new kinds of Shenzheners: locals as a new kind of renter class, artists as the up and coming middle class, and squatters as the lowest of the city’s urban proletariat. Importantly, the area’s distance from the city center means that its one marketable asset is precisely the feature it wants to destroy – its rural and undeveloped nature (in all senses of the world).

Dawang and its Culture Highland are featured in That’s PRD’s introduction to new artspaces in Guangzhou and Shenzhen. Pictures of the lay of the land, below.

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