Category Archives: shenzhen elsewhere

Sitka Center for Art and Ecology

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i am ready to leap, picture from first walk along estuary

i am presently at the sitka center for art and ecology for a month long artist residency. i have the pleasure of being here with Matthew Bower, Kim R Stafford, and Dawn Stetzel.

i am enjoying the feeling of being overwhelmed, both by the beauty of this environment and the gratitude i feel for this opportunity. my initial forays into this new and radically different environment have helped me to begin thinking holistically again. i am struck by how these sweeping landscapes open the mind to interconnections and windswept meetings. thinking about the deathly perfection of gold, i folded an ingot and photographed it along the coastline. paper boats, paper tigers, golden paper for the dead…


paper ingot

also, this is my first attempt at engaging shenzhen without academic scaffolding and presenting myself as an artist (with admittedly ethnographic inclinations). i am here to work on a series of image poems that interpret the transformation of shenzhen at the nexus of two discourses – the chinese discourse of the five elements and the western medical discourse of prosthetic construction. specifically, i am interested in mapping the cosmological implications of the transvaluation of chinese cartographies brought on by the ongoing construction of shenzhen. will post images.

away from my post

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I have just returned from my trip north. The following three entries were written in Tianjin, Beijing, and Chengde, but could only be uploaded from my Shenzhen proxy. I will be away for the next three weeks. Happy summer.


me, traveling

变通: thoughts from chengde

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This was written on July 23.

Biantong (变通): the ability to apply successfully knowledge about A to B. The two characters constituting this word—bian (变) and tong (通)—suggest an understanding of intelligence as a capacity to adapt past knowledge and experience to and thus pass smoothly through the challenges of the present. At the level of cultural history, biantong simultaneously reproduces and changes tradition, creating new worlds where vestiges of the old not only have salience, but also continue function. Visiting Chengde these past few days has helped me deepen my understanding of the establishment of Shenzhen as an instance of biantong. Specifically, Chinese Emperors and socialist leaders have continuously established new cities to initiate political change or diversify administrative s policies while maintaining stability in the capital.

Qing hegemony rested on obtaining legitimacy within both Han and non-Han ethnic communities. On the one hand, the Qing were Manchurians, but governed an Empire that was primarily Han. Indeed, in the state apparatus that the Qing took over from the Ming, Beijing signified the centrality of Han ethnic identity for state building and identity formation. As a first step to securing their hegemony, the Qing occupied the forbidden city (故宫), the former center of the Ming Empire. However, to redeploy the Ming state apparatus for their own ends, the Qing Emperors mastered Han culture, presenting themselves as the embodiment of the Mandate of Heaven. The Qianlong Emperor’s mastery of Han calligraphy and poetry forms, for example, fueled rumors that he was actually a Han Chinese, rather than a Manchurian.

On the other hand, to appeal to non-Han and non-Manchurian ethnic groups, the Qing court promulgated Tibetan Buddhism (密宗), which was practiced throughout much of the non-Han Empire (Mongolia, Xinjiang, Tibet, Yunnan, and western Sichuan in addition to Manchuria). In contemporary jargon, the Qing located “minority affairs” in Chengde, where they resided in Chengde for five months a year—from May through October. More to the point of this blog entry, Chengde enabled the Qing to place Tibetan Buddhism at the center of imperial policy, something that could not be easily achieved in Beijing, which was already built to reflect Han cosmology. Once Tibetan Buddhism had been firmly established as the court religion, it could be transferred to Beijing. For example, the Yongzheng Emperor donated his pre-ascension Beijing residence, the Yonghe Palace to Tibetan Buddhist monks.

Clearly, minority affairs not only constituted a key element of Qing administration, but also necessitated what was effectively a second capital, begging the question: how much change can be ordered from the capitol, but not implemented there? Many people, myself included, have ascribed the success of reforms in Guangdong, generally and Shenzhen, specifically as an instance of “the Emperor is far away and the mountains high (山高皇帝远)”. However, the fact that the Qing needed a second capitol to administer a multi-ethnic empire complicates this description of change from below. Instead, it seems that political change in China has also occurred because the constraints that Beijing’s bureaucracy have imposed on the Emperor can be mediated by spatial distance. In other words, the Emperor deployed and the Communists continue to biantong urban space with an eye to transforming Beijing and by extension the country.

I have elsewhere discussed Shenzhen’s establishment in terms of the Maoist policy of “important cities (重点城市)”. While in Chengde, I became aware the extent to which the establishment of the Qing’s “Mountain Resort (避暑山庄: the Chinese includes the idea of ‘summer retreat’)” enabled them to govern the Empire through means that would have been both difficult and ineffective in Beijing. Yet once in place in Chengde, these same policies could be re-imported to the capital as national policy. Suddenly, the establishment of Shenzhen appears to be well within Chinese administrative –both imperial and Maoist—history. Cultural continuity through biantong . More importantly, thinking about Shenzhen through Chengde firmly situates the SEZ’s so-called lack of history within Chinese cultural-political history. From the height of Chengde’s mountains, it seems ignorant to argue that Shenzhen doesn’t have a history. Indeed, such arguments appear to be motivated disinformation; who benefits and how when Shenzhen is described as being without history or culture?

My regrettably fast tour of Chengde included visits to Puning Temple (普宁寺), the little Potala Palace (普陀宗乘之庙; the Mandarin refers to Tibetan Buddhism as Tantric Buddhism), the Mountain Resort, and Sledgehammer Peak (磬椎峰). While there, I enjoyed the cooling beauty of Chengde’s trees.

thoughts from beijing

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Two Days in Beijing written on July 18 and 19

1. Embodied knowledge

Yesterday morning, Yang Qian and I came to Beijing by way of the Tianjin temporary train station, a hot, smoky, and crowded structure located in the semi-mangled space behind a Carrefour strip mall and a construction site. Two years ago, workers threw it together out of inexpensive bricks and cement; city officials designed the provisional station to be dismantled as soon as the new station opens on August 1. We approached the station along a clogged side street, walking past backed up traffic, stumbling over discarded bricks, and tripping when our suitcase wheels got stuck in a pothole. I bumped into a man who had paused to light a cigarette. We rushed through the main door, up rickety stairs, and into the airless waiting room, where several hundred people loitered restlessly.

I felt a drop of sweat run from my armpit to the crease of my elbow. Yang Qian used a tissue to wipe his forehead. A family squatted several feet away, playing cards. A cigarette dangled from the father’s lips as he considered his options. After decisively throwing down a five of hearts, he sucked deeply on the cigarette, pinched it between the index and middle fingers of his right hand, and removed it from between his lips, exhaling bluish smoke. His gaze turned to his son, who squinted at the cards carefully arranged in his hand. Two young women sashayed past us toward a concession stand. They wore sleeveless tee shirts, low-riding jeans, and spiked four-inch heels. Matching gold belts set-off flat stomachs and narrow hips. Several people slept on newspapers spread across the concrete floor, their heads cushioned on backpacks, their bodies arranged protectively over large, plastic bags. Another phone rang and I heard someone scream, “I’m at the train station, I’ll do it tomorrow.”

“Can’t be helped.”

“Tomorrow.”

The train boarded five minutes before departure. The crowd abruptly surged toward the platform door, carrying us through the narrow door, down metal stairs, and onto the sleek white commuter trains that connect Tianjin to Beijing. Our first-class tickets brought us into air-conditioned coolness. We stretched comfortably into our seats and within minutes fell asleep, only waking as the train pulled into Beijing station.

2. Spatial awareness

In Shenzhen, Tianjin, and now Beijing, I have been staying in new developments: City Square, Ruijiang Estates, and Fuli City, respectively. While in Tianjin, I was struck by the lack of amenities that have become standard in Shenzhen these past five years, including large malls, coffee shops, yoga studios, and clean restaurants. The apartments in Ruijiang Estates were large and comfortable. However, the shops downstairs were small and sold inexpensive necessities like soap and salt and beer, while the services provided were limited to standard haircuts. In contrast, the absence of inexpensive breakfasts and markets defined the Fuli City complex, where coffee shops, malls, Thai and western restaurants, as well as expensive spas and salons surrounded us. Our place in Beijing was two subway stops away from the China Television Building. Remnants of the capital’s socialist neighborhoods crumbled silently behind glass and steel towers that showcased sports apparel and Armani suits, gold jewelry and summer bright accessories, and we only discovered them by accident, when our evening walk detoured through a back alley.

Last night met a good friend at Jing Wei Lou (京味楼), a restaurant located near Zhongnanhai. We got on the subway underneath the CCTV Building station and off at Tian’anmen West (north exit), where across the street, the new National Theater shimmered in the evening haze. We walked past the red walls of Zhongnanhai and turned north at the next intersection. Traditional hutong’s still define this area, which serves China’s leaders, tourists, and locals who want authentic local flavors. Jing Wei Lou serves ordinary Beijing dishes—sesame toufu, peanut and cashew spinach, zhajiang noodles, stewed intestines, dai fish—of extraordinary flavor and reasonable price. In other parts of the city, like Fuli City, food of similar quality easily costs four times what it does at Jing Wei Lou. Indeed, in Fuli City, we often ate at chains simply because they were significantly cheaper than unique restaurants. Apparently, many leaders use Jing Wei Lou as their working canteen and so taste and price reflect market conditions.

3. Temporal consciousness

I am differently aware of time in Beijing, where I have fewer distractions than in either Tianjin or Shenzhen: no internet connection, no urge to walk around in the afternoon sun, no relatives to hang out with, no yoga studio, no prepaid service at a salon, no membership at a swimming pool, no interviews to conduct, no deadlines to meet, no books to read, no movies to watch…In Shenzhen, appointments structure my engagement with the city grows out of shuttling from my home to work to the yoga studio to a restaurant to an interview and back home to write an article or blog post. In Tianjin, family obligations organize my time. I eat breakfast, hang out, eat lunch, take a nap, watch some television with my sister-in-law, talk with my mother-in-law, eat dinner, and then go out for a movie or a coffee or a dessert with my niece. In Beijing, I still think about eating and going out and taking pictures, but there are no immediate social consequences to my decisions and so how I feel at any given moment shapes my day. Am I hungry? Bored? Thirsty? In the absence of definitive feelings, I grow lazy, flipping through my dictionary or sitting at my computer writing blog posts that will be uploaded only after I return to Shenzhen.

This afternoon a five hour trip to Chengde with a good friend and a new friend.

thoughts from tianjin

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This entry was written in Tianjin on July 17.

These past two days, I have been in Tianjin, visiting in-laws. I also met Joel and Jessica of China Hope Live. My trip here has me thinking about how habit informs what we can see and experience. I left Tianjin more strongly convinced that there are many Chinas, not simply scattered over the country’s official territory, but also flourishing within the country’s diverse municipalities.

The first two impressions I had of Tianjin were of lack—no blue sky and not many tall buildings. Clearly, I was looking at Tianjin through eyes accustomed to seeing Shenzhen, where smog is the exception and glass skyscrapers the new norm, especially in Luohu, where I have been living. Moreover, these observations included unreflective judgments: (1) Shenzhen is cleaner and therefore better than Tianjin and (2) Shenzhen is wealthier than Tianjin and therefore more contemporary. Both judgments confirmed that my decision to live in Shenzhen was correct.

Only after a bit of acclimatization did I begin to see Shenzhen through what Tianjin might offer. In particular, one of the most important aspects of leaving Shenzhen is that it enables me to place Shenzhen within national trajectories, rather than within and against Hong Kong trajectories. This balance is one of the most difficult things to maintain when thinking about Shenzhen, which is both a Cantonese and a PR Chinese city. Histories of Shenzhen need to be written from both Hong Kong and Beijing, otherwise it is too easy to overlook either the role of policy or that of international capitalism in the construction of Shenzhen. Below are ways of thinking Shenzhen through impressions of Tianjin.

First, a literate rather than simply oral take on local history, as well as ongoing efforts to interpret that history with respect to national history. In Shenzhen, I usually hear the line “there is no history here ()” as self-serving justification for ongoing development and attempts to transfer landuse rights from village corporations to the state. However, in Tianjin the idea of no history is differently nuanced. On the one hand, Tianjin was one of the most important Chinese cities both before 1949 and during the Mao era. As in Shenzhen many important events have taken place here. On the other hand, many of Tianjin’s older residents went to school both before and after 1949. Indeed, Nankai University is located in Tianjin. These older residents can both discuss Tianjin with respect to Chinese imperial history as well as reframe the Chinese Revolution. Thus, unlike in Shenzhen, where local residents have experienced the effects of policy decisions, in Tianjin, some local residents have been recording, contemplating, and evaluating past events for over 100 years. In this sense, Shenzhen has history as a memory, while in Tianjin it is possible to use written histories to supplement oral history. Indeed, much intellectual work in Shenzhen entails documenting the present for future interpretations. Suddenly, the importance of “making history” seems more urgent in Shenzhen, and the concomitant responsibilities heavier if only because there are people writing history in Tianjin and so few of us in Shenzhen.

Second, time in Tianjin shows up the historic specificity of both forms and evaluations of globalization. In contrast to Shenzhen, where globalization is celebrated as the means of unmaking the mistakes of socialism, Tianjin’s colonial enclaves once proved the moral failures and social injustices that constituted Western imperialism. Indeed, one way to frame both Tianjin and Shenzhen history as moments in the history of the People’s Republic would be to look at the histories of these two cities as different efforts to use Western capitalism for Chinese ends. Another take would be to compare and contrast how foreign capitalists invested and inhabited these two cities. The dormitory system seems a wonderful place to begin such a study. Another would be to look at patterns of immigration. Still another might be to trace the conceptualization and construction of foreign enclaves, which have been reproduced in Shenzhen, not as concessions, but rather as neighborhoods that cater to foreign tastes, including private homes, English language schools, and leisure. Finally, one could also examine how Tianjin functioned and Shenzhen has functioned to prepare young Chinese to go abroad are remake China’s position in the world.

Third, the way that the Shenzhen experiment has and has not been picked up and redeployed outside Guangdong. While in Tianjin, I noticed the presence of China Merchants (招商集团) and Vanke (万科集团). It would be interesting to track these transformations through the presence of Shenzhen people in Tianjin, as well as Shenzhen financed projects. I know several Shenzhen architects and developers, who have projects in Tianjin. In Shenzhen, I hear about these projects, but have never visited them.

This trip has reminded me how travel helps counteract the mental numbing that all too often accompanies the repetitions of my daily routine. In the hazy light of a Tianjin morning, it seems even more necessary to organize my life to facilitate clear thinking, or if not completely clear thinking, to organize my life to make apparent the sedimentation of thought. Pictures of Tianjin index this process.

Today, after breakfast, we leave Tianjin and head to Beijing for the weekend.

talk of a global future (revised june 25, 2008)

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Over the past few years, Shenzhen has emerged on the American public’s map of China and all sorts of people have been using the municipality to talk about globalization. Just recently, Rolling Stone published Naomi Klein’s articleAll Seeing Eye (sz fieldnote here), and on June 8, 2008 the New York Times Magazine architecture issue published The New, New City by Nicolai Ouroussoff. Indeed, these articles constitute part of a growing public literature on Shenzhen, which includes The Power of Migrants, Wall-Mart Nation, In Chinese Boomtown, Middle Class Pushes Back, and the more general, China’s Instant Cities. In tone, these articles are slightly less sensationalist than Newsweek’s 1999 article Wasted Youth, in which Mahlon Meyer commemorated the tenth anniversary of 6.4 by visiting Shenzhen and suggesting “For Those On The Fringe, Post-Tiananmen China Is A World Of Disaffected Punks And Casual Sex. This May Be Good.”

The diversity of topics, notwithstanding, these articles all use urbanization in Shenzhen to ask: What will the global future be? Who’s creating it? Where is it taking shape? When did it first appear? Why is like this? How can we participate in it? The architects in Ouroussoff’s article are clearly aware of this.

“The old contextual model is not very relevant anymore,” Jesse Reiser, an American architect working in Dubai, told [Ouroussoff] recently. “What context are we talking about in a city that’s a few decades old? The problem is that we are only beginning to figure out where to go from here.”

“The irony is that we still don’t know if postmodernism was the end of Modernism or just an interruption,” Koolhaas told [Ouroussoff] recently. “Was it a brief hiatus, and now we are returning to something that has been going on for a long time, or is it something radically different? We are in a condition we don’t understand yet.”

Indeed, more than any other group (in English), architects have been debating the shape, form, and meaning of the municipality. See, for example, In Shenzhen: City of Expiration and Regeneration.

Lately I wonder if Americans have difficulty thinking Shenzhen because the “suddenness” that we are experiencing is an effect of journalism. Unquestionably, journalists’ discovery of Shenzhen has been abrupt. However the city has been under construction for thirty years and China has been pursuing industrial urbanization projects since 1949. Much of what is happening today in Shenzhen grows out of those past years, and in within the context of local and national history, Shenzhen’s urban growth begins to make sense.

For example, urban villages (城中村) and handshake buildings (握手楼) are neither recent, nor original to the city. Indeed, what are now called urban villages were once called new villages (新村). The early Shenzhen administration, which at the time was not a municipal government annexed village land for urban construction and assigned villages land for pursuing their own livelihood. At the time planners imagined that the villagers would provision the new industrial zone with food. New villages were thus first constructed within this model of urban-rural co-dependency. Consequently, the first generation of new village housing were two to three story private homes. However, villagers immediately realized there was more to be made through smuggling, small businesses, and rental property. The so-called handshake buildings are second generation buildings, which were built on plats determined through a re-negotiation of new village lands and actualize more fully the transformation of village residential housing into rental property. At the same time, urban growth meant that residential and commercial areas soon surrounded, but did not annex the villages, resulting in the effect today of urban-within-villages (the literal translation of 城中村).

In addition, most Americans are unfamiliar with levels of population density in Chinese cities. We are not accustomed to thinking at a scale beyond baby cities of a couple hundred thousand. China’s population (1.3 billion) is roughly 4 times that of the US (300 million). When using that crude, very crude formula all sorts of things come into perspective. Houston (estimated population 4 million), for example, would have an adjusted population of 16 million, falling between Shenzhen (estimated population of 10-12) and Shanghai, China’s largest city (estimated population of 20-odd million). NYC (pop 8 mil.) would have an adjusted population of 32 million. Chongqing–now an independent city and fasted growing urban complex on the planet–has an estimated population of 30-odd million. Yet most Americans have never heard of Chongqing, which has been characterized in the western press as “invisible“.

In the Fall of 1999, I had several job interviews at the annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association. One of my interviewers asked, “What’s global about Shenzhen?” That question flummoxed me. After five years of living and working in Shenzhen, I took it as self-evident that Shenzhen had always been global. For me the more interesting question was—what isn’t global here? I spent several critical moments trying to ascertain if the question had been asked ironically, and then began to explain that the SEZ had been established in 1980 to reform and open the Chinese socialist political-economy. Reform entailed dismantling the structures of urban work units and rural communes; opening meant allowing foreign capital to fund and profit from this process. Of course, the Chinese government hoped to control how investment occurred, but foreign capital came with all sorts of price tags, some expected others not. The process actualized both the direction and context of Shenzhen’s construction. On the one hand, the goal was to become an international city. On the other hand, the investors, architects, and workers who came to Shenzhen had diverse ideas of what it meant to be international. Of course, what has been built and is under construction exceeds all of that. Exponentially.

In retrospect, it seems clear that I misunderstood the point of the question, which I now understand to be—what do we [scholars of rural Latin America] have in common with Shenzhen? I wanted to talk about Shenzhen with respect to Chinese history since 1949; they wanted to talk about Shenzhen in ways that illuminated and could be enriched by their research on indigenous Andean societies. We could have found common ground to accommodate all concerns, but it would have meant shifting our perspectives, decentering our cognitive maps, and listening more than we were accustomed to doing. Consequently, taking globalization as a topic of conversation didn’t enable us to accommodate international diversity, let alone find a topic that was mutually interesting. Instead, talking about globalization ironically confirmed the borders of our conversational homelands, reproducing the intellectual provincialism that often shapes discourse—academic and otherwise.

The conversations that Americans are having about Shenzhen now constitute an important component of our understanding, evaluation, and realization of globalization. Yet, at present the discourse has yet to leave familiar territory: distopian futurism and exultant capitalism. I think the reason for the impasse is, in part, that we’re still talking about the future of American cities, rather than what might be a truly international future. We have not yet created the perspective necessary to imagine, discuss, and evaluate what it means to live in cities that are simultaneously diverse and co-dependent.

all seeing eyes

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several days ago, i read naomi klein’s article china’s all-seeing eye and viewed the accompanying photographs by thomas lee. since then, i have been thinking about how seriously to take her claims, how shenzhen functions in her argument, how shenzhen appears in lee’s images, and the cultural politics of guan (管), which are importantly similar to and different from the cultural politics of foucault’s panopticism.

in “all-seeing eye”, klein discusses globalization in terms of the cooperation between u.s. and chinese companies to develop and integrate surveillance technologies. according to the article, the goal of “golden shield” is to make it possible to cross-reference data from cellphones, computers, cameras, facilitating the surveillance of chinese citizens and, in institutions, workers. in turn, the goal of these companies is to sell the technology back to the united states, where it would be used.

shenzhen functions in this argument as the new kind of place that makes this kind of development possible. neither chinese nor american, but rather the place where china becomes more like the united states and the united states more like china, shenzhen is the place where capitalism and totalitarianism are reworked into “market stalinism,” which is then redeployed throughout the rest of china and exported to the united states. on klein’s reading, “market stalism” combines the worst excesses of both socialism and capitalism and is the inner logic of globalism. in this argument china stands for socialism and the united states for capitalism.

rolling stone published lee’s photos to illustrate klein’s report. the photographs’ formal composition and klein’s article become a reader’s primary tools for interpreting shenzhen. however, here’s the rub: in an interview, klein states that her goal is to “show how u.s. and china more and more alike, creation of a middle ground”. however, the photographer, thomas lee invoked the aesthetic conventions of creative photography to organize photographic composition. in these pictures, people in the foreground are blurred, while the background is in focus. consequently, the images show a shenzhen that is depersonalized and off-kilter. for an american viewer, these pictures do not provide common ground, rather its opposite—a looming gulf that threatens to swallow anyone who would dare cross over.

for foucault, jeremy bentham’s panopticon is the paradigm of how surveillance technologies secure modern power. the panopticon is not a thing, but rather a particular organization of space, specifically a prison. at the center of panoptic space is a tower, which is surrounded by buildings, divided into cells, where large windows allow the supervisor to observe the inmates of the prison. importantly, although the inmates can see the tower, they cannot see the supervisor. moreover, the arrangement of the cells insures that the inmates are isolated from one another.

the panopticon illustrates several important aspects of modern power. first, it operates even if no one is in the tower; inmates cannot know when they are and are not being watched. this means that they must act as if they are always being watched. second, the supervisor is also placed in power relations; the supervisor must also assume that he is being watched at all times. indeed, it is more likely the case that the supervisor is always being watched than any one inmate. third, the environment is designed so that no one individual can assume power, instead the inmates and the supervisor are placed within a physical environment that is itself the form of power; both the supervisor and the inmates are subordinated to the requirements of the environment.

the connections between klein’s “all-seeing eye” and the panopticon are relatively clear. the new surveillance technologies enable government officials, police officers, and management to use the built environment to monitor citizens and workers. in addition to cameras, these technologies include accessing individuals through their cell phones, internet practices, credit card records, and digitalized data banks. in addition, those positioned as “supervisors” are themselves also subject to surveillance. finally, the ability to monitor others is diffused throughout the system, making all members of society variously positioned supervisors and inmates. thus, the key distinction between citizens is how deeply one is embedded in these relationships and, by extension, how much control over the use of these technologies one has. however, no one member of society has absolute access to and therefore absolute control over the surveillance apparatus.

how do the cultural politics of panopticism (so glossed) differ from the cultural politics of guan (to be glossed)? in shenzhen, guan refers to practices of taking charge, ranging from teaching a student how to hold a pen through organizing social events to directing traffic and enforcing laws. like panoptic methods, guan practices target human bodies. teachers routinely hold a student’s hands when she is learning to write; the organization of events often entails mass calisthenics or the performance of many bodies in coordinated action—at our school, marching is considered one of the signs of effective pedagogy; directing traffic and law enforcement both entail the placement of bodies with respect to each other within a given environment. this is important: like panopticism, guan authorizes certain forms of violence in order to bring bodies into alignment with society. both tian’anmen and currently, tibet are examples of guan. moreover, like panopticism, guan practices presuppose constant monitoring. the image of chinese students doing homework, while their mother, father, and grandparents watch and intervene exemplifies guan.

however, unlike panopticism, guan practices draw legitimacy from the understanding that disciplining bodies is a form of caretaking. in this sense, guan requires the physical presence of those who guan and those who are guan-ed. as such, there are many instances of people excessively guan-ing those in their charge. excessive guan-ing makes for tiring social relations. both the guan-er and the guan-ed find themselves in constant negotiation. for many teachers and students at my school, for example, guan-ing a student’s homework is a necessary evil. nevertheless, guan is unquestionably better than the alternative, which would be “not to guan,” leaving the child to do whatever she wanted to, but failing to help prepare her to take high school and college entrance exams. a similar logic characterizes many chinese criticisms of the government. if schools collapse in an earthquake; it is a result of a failure to guan. if those who failed to guan continue in power, it is also a failure to guan. hunger, unemployment, social unrest—all are symptoms of governmental failure to guan.

on foucault’s reading, guan is not a modern form of power. however, most of my Chinese friends don’t trust abstract monitoring; they believe in the physical absence of a guan-er is an untenable. they point to the fact that many of the surveillance cameras don’t work, cellphone sim cards are bought, sold, and disposed of at unregulated street kiosks (i.e. cellphone numbers are unregistered in china), and its relatively easy to hack around the great firewall. in other words, the clearest difference between the cultural politics of panopticism and guan is the assumption of how successful surveillance actually can be. insofar as the underlying metaphor of panopticism is incarceration, it presupposes human bodies are always already at the disposal of surveillance operations. in contrast, guan presupposes that human bodies constantly allude surveillance operations.

chinese parents and teachers repeatedly lament that little bodies may be placed at desks and isolated from other little bodies, and yet the supervisors still cannot guan their charges, whose “hearts are not in place (心不在焉)” and “spirits absent themselves (出神)”. at the social level, it is even more difficult to ensure proper guan-ing. most of my friends assume that if something is being guan-ed, it is because someone has a penchant for excessive guan-ing (like a busybody), has been forced to take charge (by public opinion), or has a private agenda (internal politics). indeed, many have resigned themselves to the impossibility of successfully guan-ing children and colleagues, let alone the country. “can you guan it (管得了吗)?” they frequently sigh in a social world where peasants frequently protest change, students and netizens argue for increasing freedoms, and tibetans continue to protest han rule.

panopticism infuses klein’s interpretation of new surveillance technologies. her critique draws its power from the fact that no one wants to be locked up, monitored, and isolated from human companionship. indeed, the panopticon provides a working model of how to deny human beings our humanity. in contrast, the underlying metaphor of guan is disciplinary care-taking; as a form of social power it draws legitimacy from the fact that all of us has been guan-ed. indeed, guan provides a working model of how to transform babies into social beings, and individuals into “company men” and “citizens”.

as an american, i have a visceral aversion to the world that klein describes in “all seeing eye”. as a resident of shenzhen, i wonder how likely it is that such a world can come into existence. i have difficulty imaging how many supervisors would be needed to actually make such supervision effective. after red lights have been run, cellphone numbers regularly changed, and great firewalls hacked, it seems interesting to ask how effective surveillance technologies can be in the absence of social support for them. i find it easier to imagine that these technologies might be used to target certain individuals and groups.

that is to say, that in order for surveillance technologies to function, one must also circumscribe freedom of movement in order to successfully monitor and through this monitoring, control the actions of a group of people. when moving surveillance into an undefined space, it seems necessary to limit the number of surveillance targets an institution can successfully monitor. i can imagine searching for one or two people; i have difficulty imagining how one would monitor several thousand, or ten thousand, or three million. consequently, i believe that the successful use of surveillance technologies necessitates the concomitant targeting, monitoring and isolating specific groups of people such as workers in a factory, students in a plaza, monks in a monastery, travelers on an airplane, residents of apartment complexes. in this sense, effective surveillance requires some form of social consent in addition to the construction of an environment in which everyone might monitor everyone else–a time and place more like a cultural revolutionary chinese work unit than it is like contemporary shenzhen.

in shenzhen, the most blatant and pervasive surveillance abuses occur at work, where supervisors control workers’ bodies by placing them on assembly lines or at desks. supervisors further control these bodies through compulsory overtime. factory dormitories also give supervisors off the clock access to worker lives. but again, on the clock, if supervisors physically leave the premises, workers talk, relax, head off to the restaurant. in mandarin, they say “superiors have policy, inferiors have counter policy (上有政策，下有对策)”. and, of course, off the clock, workers leave the factories and head into unsupervised spaces.

what concerns me in klein’s argument is her assertion that becoming more like china means becoming more totalitarian. i believe her when she says that these technologies are being built. i believe her when she argues that their are chinese and american officials who want to install more effective surveillance technologies. however, i also believe that if one’s goal is to turn society into a prison, it is not enough simply to install these technologies. one must also convince a population to accept monitoring of themselves (at work or in an airport, for example) and of targeted individuals and groups (middle easterners and tibetans, for example). in this respect, totalitarianism is not only a set of architectural practices, but also and more fundamentally, a set of social practices that are not uniquely “chinese”.

i support klein’s anti-totalitarianism. however, i also hope that the effectiveness of her rhetoric does not depend upon reducing the diversity of chinese people to the stereotype of “unthinking subjects of a totalitarian state”. the united states can only become more totalitarian through the actions of our citizens and leaders, not through the actions of people anywhere else, our cultivated fear of them, notwithstanding.

thoughts from kunming

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artist area, kunming

Yesterday, I arrived in Kunming to spend some time with my old friend, Sasha. We are staying in a factory area that is being converted into an art area, with studios, restaurants, and cheap overnight housing. Just around the corner is an art center set up by a group of Scandinavians.

When the cab driver dropped me off here he sighed and asked, “What are the workers going to do?”

And that’s part of the question that’s posed by the abrupt transformation of Shenzhen factories into upgraded productive areas, like the creative technologies in Xiasha, design offices in Tianmian, and bohemian art facilities in OCT loft: even if it isn’t the artists’ fault that factories are closing and moving to new areas, what are the workers going to do?

I find this question, along with questions about the salience of a workers’ revolution muted in Shenzhen. Or perhaps its more accurate to say, the questions seemed forced because there’s little (left) in the environment that directly references what gentrification has meant for workers’ quality of life or how the Shenzhen experiment grew out of issues raised by the revolution.

Historical forms of silencing or glossing over the question of working class politics in Shenzhen include:

1. Shenzhen workers are defined by their exclusion from the city. This exclusion is an overdetermined effect of hukou policies, urban design, and Shenzhen social protocols. First, migrant workers do not have Shenzhen hukou and are therefore technically not “Shenzheners”. Second, factories workers either live in dormitories or new villages. This means that they are either unseen (in the case of dormitories) or subsumed under the category of local villager (in the case of new villages). Third, if a migrant worker has earned enough money to move into white collar neighborhoods, that person is considered a Shenzhener. The key here is that, except for local villagers, everyone living in Shenzhen migrated to work. The class distinction between office and factory work is the pivot on which rights to belonging in the city hinge.

2. Shenzhen’s traditional “workers” were Baoan farmers, who have yet to embody either the revolution or reform. For most Chinese and foreigners the classic Chinese worker was defined by socialist industrialization during the 50s and 60s in cities like Harbin, Shenyang, and Dalian; the forms of industrialization that have taken place since 1980, do not fall under the same rubric and therefore have also produced a different understanding of workers. Indeed, post Mao urbanization has entailed transforming rural areas and rural people into cities and urban residents. In this process, the actual class relations defining industrial production get recast as “cultural”.

Specifically, after Liberation, Baoan County was designated for rural production. This meant that during the Mao years, villagers were not factory workers, who represented the socialist vanguard. Under Deng, Baoan county was elevated to the status of Shenzhen Municipality. As such, the ideal Shenzhener has been an urban, white collar worker. In other cities, like Kunming, the shift in social importance from factory to office workers represents a re-valuation of class relations internal to the city itself. Rural migrant workers and traditional factory workers embody different forms of lower class urban possibility. However, in Shenzhen, this contradiction has not actualized as such because there were never factory workers here. Instead, Shenzhen actualizes an intensification of the relative ranking of rural and urban lives. In this sense, Shenzhen’s recent history has been consistent with Maoism in ways that prevent urban residents from reflecting on the injustices that have come along with reform.

3. Shenzhen buildings have a half-life of seven years. It takes active searching to find, photograph, and categorize traces of history, both socialist and local. During the eighties and nineties Shenzhen produced electronics and textiles and toys and shoes and what-not, those factories have since been razed or transformed. In the SEZ itself, the few factories that remain are being upgraded into cultural industries centers like the design center in Tianmian or commercial areas like in Huaqiangbei.

A visit to a city like Kunming where it is still possible to find Stalinist architecture on a main street or still functional factories downtown highlights the Shenzhen impulse to erase all traces of manufacturing, instead projecting an image of already actualized upper middle class city that was never build on production. A city of two classes–white collar workers and their servants and servers. With manufacturing located offsite out of sight and their for out of mind.

The ironies and the difficulties that entangle workers and artists (even before complete capitalization of the Chinese economy) are perhaps represented by “The Materialist (唯物主义者),” a statue by Wang Guangyi (王广义) that stands in front of the Gingko Elite (翠湖会) shopping center. Want Guangyi’s work was once banned in the PRC because it combined socialist and pop cultural symbols. His resistance to the socialist state increased his marketability among Western collectors. That his work is now public culture in Kunming suggests both the extent to which China has changed as well as the need for reminders of why the revolution was and continues to be necessary.

The commodification of culture defines contemporary gentrification in Shenzhen. The difference I am noting is how the process remains built into Kunming’s urban space, while in Shenzhen this process is a glorified municipal policy to create a city in keeping with global standards. Although I could be wrong. However, the presence of the Scandanavians suggests a different kind of reliance on government funding for art.

In addition to manifesting socialist history through remnant buildings, Kunming also has monuments to the revolution. We visited the Yunnan Army Training School, just near Lake Cui. The large compound seems a popular tourist site, and I saw two brides posing for pictures within the compound space. Inside was an installation that wrote Yunnan’s Double Nine (重九) uprising into national history, indeed, an installation that positioned Yunnan at the forefront of the revolution. When I later asked some Chinese friends, they said they new about the War to Save the Nation (护国战), but not the Double Nine, which even had its own flag.

So points of comparison with Shenzhen.

leaving north carolina

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back road, moore county, north carolina

carolina sky, sharp and clear in the winter, set-off by stark pines, uplifting tired eyes. images here.

wintersun, charlottesville, va

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skyward branches

i shared a snowday with my nieces and nephew in charlottesville, va, a life so far from shenzhen that i often can’t put my worlds together. not in any coherent way. when in charlottesville, i don’t remember much about shenzhen. while in shenzhen, i often forget how to walk from my brother’s house to the nearby trail. and yet the pictures all line up next to each other on this blog. enjoy the wintersun