Category Archives: shenzhen fieldnotes

儒商: classical fantasies

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one of the more interesting figures to haunt the landscape of chinese reforms is the “confucian merchant (儒商)”. there is an online club and international confucian merchants association. according to an article written by dean of the confucian academy and chair of the hong kong confucian merchants association tang enjia (汤恩佳),confucian merchants approach commerce in the spirit of confucious, conducting their affairs in accordance with the five central values of confucianism: benevolence, righteousness, propriety, wisdom, and trust (仁、义、礼、智、信). for the confucian merchant the greatest of these is trust (诚信), which shares an uncanny etymology with “credit (信用).”

i have my doubts about the possibility of mercantile confucianism, in part because confucianism strikes me as decidedly feudal and current business practices decidedly capitalist and also in part because the figure of the confucian merchant seems to legitimate all kinds of inequality, much in the same way that romances about tormented, but ultimately good-hearted tycoons justify unequal social relations. but mine could be a cynicism born of reading too many text messages, like the one currently circulating about wang shi (王石), the ceo of shenzhen’s mega-real estate development company vanke 万科. googling “wang shi vanke” brings up all sorts of capitalist self-congratulatory stories in english, including an article in nytimes real estate magazine. googling 万科王石 brings up even more, including his blog.

王石者，广西柳州人氏。其母戎狄也，故性焊。少有异志，及长，经营房产，遂至巨富。石好登山，每登必耗巨资，其行小善必刻石以记之。和谐年间，川中大震，灾民流离失所国人莫不解囊共济之。石出二百，并噣下捐不得过十，有人讽为“王十”，众责之，石辩曰：灾降国乃常事，吾留钱备后用。又曰：济民赈灾，人所自愿，岂能强吾所难。众评曰：身虽临绝顶，心已死苍生！

[mock classical chinese] wang shi, a person from liuzhou, guangxi. his mother was a barbarian, so he had a fierce personality. as a child he was unusual, as an adult, he operated a real estate company, realizing his dream of great wealth. shi liked to mountain climb, and spent a great deal on every climb. even the smallest detail of every expedition was engraved in stone. in the era of harmony, there was an earthquake in sichuan. the people were left destitute and homeless and there wasn’t anyone in the country who didn’t open their purse to send relief. shi only gave two [million], and ordered his subordinates not to give more than ten rmb. some starting sarcastically calling shi “wang ten”. when the people reproached him, shi defended himself: disasters frequently befall the country, this is nothing new, i’m saving my money for a later day. he also said: helping people in disaster zones is voluntary, how can i be forced? the people evaluated him thus: even though his body has reached the highest summit, his heart has already died to the people!

shi has responded to the criticism by promising 100,000,000 rmb to rebuild a sichuan market town. so yes, public humiliation has its uses…

update may 31, 2008: wang shi remains near and dear to many shenzhen hearts. when i mentioned that i had translated this message to a friend, who works in advertising, he immediately said he analyzed the whole wang shi-wenchuan phenomenon.

according to my friend, in order to understand wang shi’s response, you have to understand how the chinese media works. the first time that the earthquake was reported, the chinese press simply mentioned that there had been an earthquake in sichuan. he explained that the chinese press doesn’t proactively report, but instead waits to see how the central (or provincial or municipal) government is or is not going to respond, before it does or does not report. on my friend’s interpretation, wang shi had responded to the first reports, by the time the other reports came out, he didn’t have enough time to actually respond appropriately, leaving himself open to misunderstanding.

another friend pointed out that wang shi did the whole tycoon thing better than anyone else in china. he has charm and charisma, so that makes people want to see him fall. my firend then pointed out that the wenchuan earthquake proved [once again] that the chinese people are good (很善良), but unwise (没有智慧). wang shi, he suggested, wasn’t totally off base when he suggested that there would be need for money next disaster.

in another wang shi event, my new boss has used wang shi as an example of how to be single-minded and focused. vanke doesn’t do anything by upscale housing; a school should only have one pedagogical mission.

so here in shenzhen, we continue to watch wang shi and the development of the ethics of the city’s emergent elite. this returns me to the persistence of confucian merchants. i don’t think that wang shi qualifies as a confucian merchant in the strict sense of the term, specifically as he has self-presented as a kind of hip, smart, and living life to the fullest self-made millionaire. nevertheless, the way he has been positioned vis-a-vis wenzhou suggests that its quite alright to be hip and go mountain climbing, but in times of national disaster, the people might use the confucian merchant to call the elite to heel.

all you can do is sigh

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four battle of the sexes text messages that came strung together like bad faith.

感叹男人：
有才华的长的丑、长的帅的挣钱少、挣钱多的不顾家、顾家的没出息、有出息的不浪漫、会浪漫的靠不住、靠得住的有窝囊。
感叹女人：
漂亮的不下厨房、下厨房的不温柔、温柔的没主见、有主见的没女人味、有女人味的乱花钱、不乱花钱的不时尚、时尚的不放心、放心的没法看。

when it comes to men, all you can do is sigh:
the talented are ugly, the handsome earn next to nothing, the high earners don’t care about their families, those who care about their families have no future, those with a future aren’t romantic, the romantics can’t be relied on, and those who can be relied on are annoying.
when it comes to women, all you can do is sigh:
the pretty don’t cook, those who cook aren’t tender, the tender are clueless, the clued in aren’t feminine, the feminine spend like crazy, the thrifty aren’t fashionable, the fashionable can’t be trusted, those who can be trusted can’t be looked at.

老婆是电视、情人是手机、在家看电视、出门带手机、破产卖电视、发财换手机、偶尔看电视、整天玩手机、电视终身不收费、手机欠费就停机。

a wife is like a television, a lover like a cellphone. you watch t.v. at home, bring your cellphone when you go out. when bankrupt, you sell the t.v., when rich, you change cellphones. you watch t.v. sometimes, play with your cellphone all day. a t.v. is free for life, cellphone service stops if you miss a payment.

三十岁的男人正在学会、抱着同一代唱着同样的爱，四十岁男人已经学坏、抱着下一代唱着迟来的爱，五十岁男人最坏、抱着第三代唱着糊涂的爱。

thirty year old men are just learning to be bad, they embrace someone their own age and sing the same love song. forty year old men have already gone bad, they embrace someone from the next generation and sing a song of belated love. fifty year old men are the worst, they embrace someone their granddaughter’s age and sing a song of messed up love.

做女人一定要经得起谎言、受得起敷衍、忍得主欺骗、忘得了诺言、宁愿相信世上有鬼、也不能相信男人那张破嘴。

to succeed as a woman you have to take lies in stride, put up with indifference, endure being cheated, and forget promises. it’s better to believe in ghosts than in anything uttered by men.

sigh.

fat bird performance, may 16-23

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yang qian and kang kang

one of fat bird’s goals is to develop an audience in shenzhen for theater. truth be told, experimental theater hasn’t yet caught on. however, there is an audience for regular theater, including musical theater. just this past week, fat bird performed “once a year”, a 90-minute comedy inspired by the play “same time, next year” by bernard slade. although the run was suspended during national mourning for the wenchuan earthquake victims, when it resumed, it was to standing room only audiences. what’s more, there is now a move to extend the run for an additional five days. yang qian performed the man and kang kang, the woman who meet once a year for sex and conversation. performance photos, here.

shenzhen garbalogy

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coconuts

this morning as i walked the edge of houhai i stumbled upon another former settlement, where the squatters’ housing and kitchens had been razed, but then reconstituted in even more transient form–beds have been made inside the water pipes that are now being installed. signs of life: shoes, mosquito coils, and makeshift offerings. when i asked one of the women salvaging plastic wrapping from the site, she said that the settlement had been razed just this week. two more permanent fixtures remained–a pink shrine and a 42 stall traditional outhouse. the outhouse seemed relatively clean; perhaps it has been built in anticipation of the work teams that will soon move onto the site.

this is the second time this month that i have stumbled upon housing arrangements that have been hidden in plain sight on the border between housing built on the reclaimed land and newly reclaimed construction sites. just three weeks ago, while walking near the western corridor bridge, i came across a squatting settlement. the small pup tents were located along a sidewalk that was temporarily out of use due to construction. however, a hill and mounds of dirt in the reclamation site kept the settlement out of sight. i only came across them because i jumped the temporary barrier that had been installed, while a more permanent; it seems easier to go through concrete one was being built.

during a brief and admittedly superficial engagement with the other three anthropological subfields, i took several archaeology courses. i didn’t understand the joy of finding bicuspids, nor did i fantasize about going off to dig up the remains of lost civilizations. i did, however, like the idea of theorizing a life out of garbage, which william rathje initiated in 1973 with the tucson garbage project and popularized in 2001 with the publications of rubbish! the archaeology of garbage.

one of rathje’s points is that there are discrepancies between what we say we do and what are garbage reveals that we do. i’m not terribly interested in catching people lying; it seems unnecessarily stressful to constantly assess the degrees of truthfulness in any statement. nevertheless, i think that garbalogy might be useful when looking at how shenzhen has razed and continues to raze squatter settlements. officials maintain that shenzheners are building one of the most modern cities in china. the promise of modernity includes the promise of material comfort for all residents. however, the garbage that this process generates includes neighborhoods, family homes, and migrant livelihoods.

i like thinking about houhai through garbagology because it makes facts about squatters’ lives immediate and visceral, stubborn. it is difficult to talk one’s way around the image of a child who cut his head playing near his mother’s salvage cart. indeed, that child’s life measures the degree of truth in any statement about how globalization has been beneficial for shenzhen.

狗日的２００８

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the images from wenchuan continue nonstop. last night, a friend told me her daughter isn’t sleeping because she’s watching the live broadcasts. another told me she’s waiting for another miracle. indeed, many of my friends watch and watch and watch, crying almost everyday. when i hear stories like this, i wonder if earthquake hasn’t been deeply cathartic for many people; this has been a hard year, when doing what one’s supposed to do hasn’t been enough to hold the world together.

so history as text message (and it’s only may!):

狗日的２００８
好好过个年吧，遇雪灾了；
好好上个网吧，艳照门了；
好好传递火炬吧，闹藏独了；
发展农村医疗吧，发手足口病了；
买点股票吧，大小非减持了；
坐火车吧，还出轨了；
在家待着吧，还地震了。

dog-fucked 2008

celebrate the new year, and end up snowed under;
go online, and see edisen chen’s pornographic pictures of gillian chung (the yanzhaomen affair);
pass the olympic torch, and tibetan independence supporters riot;
develop rural medical care, and hoof and mouth disease spreads;
buy stocks, and the prices all fall;
take a train trip, and it goes off the rails;
even if you stay at home, an earthquake brings it down.

obligatory olympic torch entry

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中国加油！

i have been avoiding discussing the olympic torch procession, hoping that the sadness and the confrontation will soon lift, so that conversation might begin again. nevertheless, today i joined the crowds at city hall (市民中心) to greet the torch in shenzhen. originally scheduled to begin at 8 a.m., the procession was rescheduled for 12 o’clock. in those four hours, thousands gathered on city hall lawn and marched in the roads chanting: go china! go beijing! go olympics! (中国加油！北京加油！奥运加油！) meanwhile, police cars circulated, broadcasting the recorded message: the torch procession will not begin until noon, please go home and watch on television. those police officers not directing pedestrians or traffic were, like the rest of those of us, taking pictures.

comments heard:

my throat is so hoarse from screaming i can’t talk.

they [the government] is afraid of something happening (出事).

it’s 32 degrees, how many people do you think have fainted?

a worker from sichuan encouraged me to spread the word about how great this was for shenzhen. he reminded me that he wasn’t from here, but that he had many opportunities. he then started talking about a subject that seemed even more urgent: his lack of english skills and did i know anyone who could help him apply for u.s. copy rights for the products his company produced?

however, all the carnivalesque excitement, notwithstanding, i soon felt bored and started taking pictures of the amazing cloud formations that accompanied the torch. whatever else happened today, pictures of the event will show shenzhen shining beneath blue skies and white clouds. i then joined friends for lunch,who unlike the crowds outside seemed mildly frustrated by the whole thing. one commented that on days like this, he thought chinese people were pitiful; don’t we care about anything else? he asked rhetorically. another joked: thank god for schools and assembly lines, otherwise where would we keep all these people?! the fourth boasted: on a day like today you can get away with anything. no one knows who you are, and so no one stops you.

indeed. obligatory pics of olympic torch procession, shenzhen.

大鹏所城: on cultural history

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dapeng suocheng inner garden

Once or twice a decade, I want material proof–as opposed to theoretical reconstruction and anthropological speculation–that Shenzhen has more than 30 years of culture. Usually, I go about asserting long term cultural occupation of the area as if it were a self-evident truth. Even if the landscape isn’t what it was or the buildings are less than ten years old, I say, there are deep histories histories here: listen. However, as I just mentioned, once or twice a decade, my resolve falters and I wonder: is it possible that what my informants and friends say is true? That Shenzhen doesn’t have any culture?

Now 文化 (wenhua) seems to me tricky to translate because its tied up in understandings about history and accomplishment in ways different from the english word, culture. For example, a maid explains that she hasn’t culture (我没有文化) because she didn’t go to high school. Or when I say I like hakka food, a friend agrees that Hakka culture is rich (客家文化很丰富). Or again, when someone asserts that unlike Beijing, Shenzhen doesn’t have any culture (深圳没有文化) because it is a young city. In hese three examples, the meaning of culture ranges from education through culinary traditions to imperial history.

Located in Longgang District on Daya bay,大鹏所城 or Dapeng Garrison is an anomaly in the Shenzhen landscape–by all counts it is culture of the highest kind. The garrison, which gives Shenzhen its nickname “roc city (鹏城)” is one of only 2,351 national important cultural relics (全国重点文物保护单位). Throughout the Ming and Qing dynasties, soldiers stationed at Dapeng protected the area from pirates and colonial forces. Architecturally, was a walled garrison city, including housing for roughly 1,000 people, at least five temples, a school, and several large family compounds, which belonged to the resident general. Socially, it represented one of the military innovations of the ming. the soldiers stationed at dapeng were also farmers; the garrison was economically self-sufficient.

So yes, Shenzhen has culture. Why, then does it go unrecognized? And not only unrecognized, unvisited. Many of my acquaintances have never heard of Dapeng and most have never visited the garrison (even as part of their patriotic education). Unsurprisingly, all the parts and tourist attractions within the garrison are closed for want of visitors.

In part, I suspect that Shenzhen’s so-called lack of culture is a product of the city’s unfettered drive to modernize; no one actually notices historic relics as such. In part, I also think that Shenzhen’s lack of culture has been a rhetorical devise to produce the area as a tabula rasa; if there was nothing here, then the space is clear for all kinds of development. I’d also argue that by claiming that Shenzhen lacks of culture, urban immigrants assert their superiority to local rural residents. But in the end, I sometimes think the answer to the question, why doesn’t Shenzhen have culture is simply practical — most inhabitants lack of the time to be curious about where we are and how we got here. Most in Shenzhen are too busy making ends meet to think beyond their immediate concerns. So we’re stuck here in a present that keeps repeating itself–build, raze, build taller, faster, bigger, raze.

Culture, it seems to me, like education, good food, and history, grows in, through, and over good time, and that is precisely what Shenzhen lacks.

Pictures of Dapeng Garrison.

of plants and smog

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shenzheners are developing an environmental consciousness. indeed, the shenzhen 2030 development strategy calls explicitly for sustainable development. so now we encounter billboards to protect endangered species. the irony, of course, is that these billboards have been raised at the former new houhai coastline. about 10 years ago, the elephant would have been standing on the beach. 20 years ago, said elephant would have been up to its knees in water, possibly even deeper.


save endangered species billboard

moreover, only five years ago, if memory serves as well as i hope, the elephant would have been standing beneath “blue skies and white clouds.” these days, smog is an all too often topic of conversation in shenzhen. most folks blame the cars, and then quickly remark that cars are necessary, both for convenience and building the economy. all of us, however, lament that the environment has deteriorated so obviously, so quickly.

at the same time, shenzhen’s furious pursuit of garden cityhood proceeds. recently exotic plants abut the new roads and construction sites of the houhai land reclamation zone. although beautiful, these plants irritate me. unlike the once ubiquitous and local banyan tree, shenzhen’s palms and bushes and flowering trees don’t provide shade. they also require large teams of gardeners, who water the plants with an irrigation system that stretches along the ever changing coastline. these plants confound me. i wonder where their gardeners live and how much they earn; as far as i know, the blue uniformed gardeners in central park, live in dorms in the park itself, but there aren’t any dorms on the landfill, only temporary construction dorms. the extent of the irrigation system also has me wondering, given the city’s water shortage, who isn’t getting water if imported fonds are. and if perhaps, we’ve reached the final coastline.

this afternoon, on the landfill, i stopped to talk with several people. one, a migrant worker who had just came to shenzhen and lived in one of the nearby shanties, said that it was nice to walk on the coastline where the air was fresher. true enough. i actually breathed in salty air. a second interlocutor, was an old shenzhener, originally from ningbo, who like like me, enjoys photography. he showed me some of the pictures in his very nice camera–flowers, parrots, traditional architecture, and old village rivers.

“unfortunately,” he said, “shenzhen is a new city, so there isn’t much beauty here.” as i understood him, beauty referred to things natural and manmade that had a graceful harmony. he admitted that all shenzhen’s glass buildings were impressive, but not yet beautiful, unlike shanghai, where old sections of the city had been preserved and improved. his comments had me wondering if we wait long enough, shenzhen will become beautiful through age. although with all the upgrading and razing of older sections of the city, this path to beauty may not be the most efficient and shenzhen may as well just stick with its the newest is the most beautiful aesthetic. speculation aside, we agreed that the smog had become a serious problem that would become even more serious, “unless the government takes serious action.” as we separated, me to take more pictures of houhai and him to continue searching for beauty, he exhorted me to visit other cities, especially shanghai, “where the environment is really beautiful.”

i am not sure if shenzhen’s utopian origin sets residents up for disappointment, or if memory creates beauty where it may not have been; i’ve been to shanghai, and i remember smog, in addition to the lovely buildings. i do think that the utopian impulse behind the city’s construction continues to inform longterm planning. the idea of shenzhen as a sustainable city is, if it is nothing else, a call to create a better future. and yet. houhai continues to transform the south china environment and climate at a pace unplanned, and more than likely, with unforeseeable environmental consequences.

pictures of plants and smog here.

shekou upgrades part the second

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green panels

the transformation of shenzhen from an industrial processing zone into a center of creativity continues, this time with a green twist. rennovation of the old sanyo factories in shekou has begun. panels with green plants have been attached, giving the area an environmental conscious atmosphere, even though i don’t think the plants do anything but grow. pictures here.

仙湖植物园: Fairylake

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yesterday, seema and i went to the hongfa temple (弘法寺) in honor of grave sweeping day (清明节). the temple is in the eastern part of the fairylake botanical garden.

during the early eighties, anthropologists noticed that there was a religious revival in china, with many temples being restored. however, in 1985, when construction began, hongfa was the first new temple built since 1949. another shenzhen first. indeed, construction work began five years before china’s first macdonald’s opened in dongmen.

i was struck by the bright orange glazed tile roofs and took a lot of pictures. during imperial times, glazed tiles were used exclusively on the buildings of the imperial palace or the homes of nobles and high ranking officials. chinese architects used yellow (orange), green, blue, and black tiles. each color had symbolic meaning. the yellow (orange) tiles signified the emperor and were only used on the roofs of royal palaces, mausoleums, gardens, and temples.

during the 1980s in shenzhen, architects used glazed tiles to adorn homes, walls, arches, hotels, museums, and restaurants. these remnants of an earlier aesthetic, which is often dismissed today as being “provincial (土)” encourage speculation about how early shenzhen residents borrowed from the past in order to imagine and create the future. on the one hand, the use of glazed tiles speaks to a democratic impulse–what’s good for the emperor is good for the common person. on the other hand, they also speak to totalitarian ambitions–i want to be king. indeed, the experience of freedom and release from convention that early shenzhen residents once described to me as that “shenzhen spirit” seems rooted in this contradiction.

an example from fieldwork, many years ago. in 1996, my mother visited and we went to beijing. we wanted to visit the beijing university campus, however, it was early july and so there were active restrictions on who could and could not enter. that same year, same month, i walked into the shenzhen municipal government without signing in. the guards knew me and waved me through. i then went to my friend’s office to continue interviews about population and urban planning.

this, of course, remains shenzhen’s central contradiction. on the one hand, many of china’s earliest critical magazines and journals were published here. on the other, shenzhen continues to produce some of the most dogmatic propaganda. on the one hand, there is a great deal of choice because everything here can be bought and sold. on the other hand, because choice is reduced to market choice, the political significance of many items is effectively blunted.

most visitors to shenzhen see either the limitless possibility that markets promise or the lack of social movements. in this way, shenzhen is either praised as an examplar of the benefits of capitalism or condemned as lacking any kind of public culture, depending on whether the visitor’s point of view. it seems to me more helpful to think about how this contradiction has been lived in the everyday life.

people who have come to shenzhen do experience a loosening of the conventions that govern behavior inland. however, this loosening has produced many individual efforts to bring about new possibilities for themselves and their families, rather than collective change. what remains to be seen is how this might open itself to a more egalitarian society, rather than remaining an egalitarianism defined by the idea that everyone has a chance to get rich.