thinking food: images from the houhai overpass, 2002-2010

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this post is a brief contextualiztion of  china lab’s  landgrab city exhibition for the shenzhen-hong kong biennale 2009. the exhibit draws attention to the the ways that cities are imagined without reference to the countryside and food production. it also usefully brings china into international conversations about urbanization.

The countryside is a vital but frequently overlooked category in the contemporary discourse around spatial policy, and its role with respect to the future of urbanism is more often than not neglected. Landgrab City is an attempt to visually represent the broader spatial identity of the 21st century metropolis; it proposes a new spatial definition of the city and thereby a more complex understanding of urbanism, one that no longer considers city limits as the boundary of its remit, but instead looks beyond – even across international borders – to the spatial, social, economic and political implications of the planet’s rapid urbanization.

i support efforts to think about food – its production, distribution, unequal consumption – are all critical to how shenzhen is imagined, experienced, and reproduced. nevertheless, this exhibition disturbs me because it discusses shenzhen as if the city were one wealthy enclave, rather than an amalgamation of enclaves -rich, poor, and destitute, which abut and constantly disrupt one another.

shenzhen has sold itself and reform in precisely the terms that china lab uses to describe the city’s “reality”. unfortunately, by taking shenzhen’s self-promotion as fact, rather than promotional fantasy, china lab overlooks  how rural migrants inhabit and  transform shenzhen. this silence distresses me because the spatial, social, economic, and political consequences of shenzhen’s modernization are not implied; they are facts of life for many migrants.

so a very simple point:

In reality, of course, these agricultural territories are not actually clustered around Shenzhen, as in the installation, but scattered across China and contiguous regions.

counter point: a five minute walk from the land grab project, agrarian squatters have persistantly grabbed, evacuated, and reoccupied  a portion of the houhai land reclamation area to grow food, which they eat and sell. the differences between overpass then and now are now are instructive because they illustrate both the persistance of shenzhen’s rural poor as well as their increasing destitution.

the map below locates the land grab project with respect to several generations of agricultural squatters at the houhai overpass.  pictures of the squatters and their gardens, here.

the houhai overpass is located at the intersection of houhai and binhai roads. in the map, the squatter areas are located in the southeast quadrant of the intersection, coastal city in the southwest, and the land grab in the northwest. these areas are roughly a five minute walk from each other. in the map, the blue areas used to be underwater; the brown areas were not.

translated space

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lately, i’ve noticed a flagrent translation violation on the 362 busline, where bus stops for urban villages (城中村) such as 新洲村 or 水围村  are announced in chinese as “villages” but in english as xinzhou estates and shuiwei estates, respectively. i’m not sure why the village vanishing act in english, when the 村 are clearly present in mandarin. perhaps the more interesting question is how those villages got to keep their designation, when others did not. (list of 362 bus stops, including the undesignated, like 石厦, which is a village but goes by “shixia” full stop, and the villages old (村) and new (新村).  i’ll keep my ears tuned to the translations of 村 and 新村 on other bilingual lines.  if anyone has noticed similar cross-language happenings in shenzhen or other chinese cities, i’d be interested to hear both what’s been translated (or not) as well as explanations as to why the (bait and) switch…

一个朋友一条路: Who can you trust in Shenzhen?

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Friendship is an important topic of conversation in Shenzhen, where people want friends (many) because friends help one do things that can’t be done alone. Yesterday, I heard two stories about making friends, both from young women who are laboring (打工) in Shenzhen. Significantly, both stories were about what work had taught them about how to make friends.

The first came from A Han, who is 18 and working in Xiao Chen’s teashop. At first, A Han didn’t like the teashop because it was boring (闷). Her job was brewing tea and chatting with people while they tasted the tea. Moreover, because people who drank tea tended to be old (not even “older”, just “old”!), they weren’t interested in fashionable topics. In contrast, A Meng described herself as lively, out-going, and up-to-date. Nevertheless, as she has learned to brew well so that the qualities of each tea can be tasted and to make conversations interesting, she has made many friends. And all these friendships are the real benefit of selling tea.

“In order to sell tea,” she explained, “you have to quiet your heart (静心) and take your time with people. We don’t force people to buy any tea, but help them satisfy their taste. In the process, we become friends.”

The second story came from A Meng, 21-year old woman who had been on her own since graduating from middle school at age 14.

When I asked her why she had left home so young, A Meng explained, “I knew I was ready to be independent. So I went to Tianjin with a relative.”

A Meng sketched the seven year sojourn that had taught her about independence. When she was fourteen, her relative brought her to Tianjin and then vanished (人不见了 – as inconclusive in Mandarin as English vanishing acts). She found a job in a factory that included room and board. After a year in the  factory, she went home for Chinese New Year and then headed out again, this time to Wuhan, where she studied to give facials and massages in a salon(作美容). After she finished her course in Wuhan, she came to Shenzhen and has been working in mid-level salons. I met her in the salon owned by the wife of the second son of a village head.

A Meng deeply valued independence and her conversation kept returning to it – independence and responsibility. She compared her level of independence to her cousin (one month younger), who has never left home and therefore even at 21 can’t make a decision without her mother’s help. Moreover, A Meng went on to say, only people who are independent can take responsibility for family and friends. Indeed, the more independent she has become, the more capable she has shown herself to be and this, in turn, has helped her make many friends.

I have been mulling the question of why friendship matters in Shenzhen. Why, in other words, do stories about work end up being lessons about how to make friends? I am beginning to think that friendship matters in Shenzhen because Chinese society in general, but business more specifically because there is a low tolerance for collaborative relations with strangers. Instead, people work to transform relations with strangers into person realtions. Continue reading →

深大南区：the map is not the territory

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the map

Originally uploaded by maryannodonnell

Once upon a time, this territory was ocean. There were oyster farms and fishing boats. And the people who lived here had single story homes that came to represent the poverty that these maps and plans would end.

The effort it takes to force territories into maps pulses through each inch of the houhai land reclamation area. Lines imagined elsewhere are being bulldozed, pounded, and moulded into six-lane highways and ten-lane expressways. Beside these roads climb glass buildings and residential developments with exotic gardens – palm trees, English grass, a goldfish pond, which is drained and cleaned once a month.

This is the territory – unmapped, but not unsung: Beneath the grey sky and rising walls of a high-tech research compound, a woman washes vinyl advertizing sheets for indigent tenting, paths veer in hidden enclaves that serve as public toilets, and a child plays on a piece of flatboard that has been placed protectively on top the mud.

Shenzhen’s poor are poorer than they were 15 years ago, when squatters had enough space and privacy to build small shelters beneath the lychee orchards that have also been imaginatively disappeared.

May the new year bring new possibilities.

chiwan 2009

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pigeons

Originally uploaded by maryannodonnell

today was the 15th of the 10 month of the lunar calendar, so i did what all good girls do – went temple hopping. chiwan is one of the natural harbors that constitute the port of shenzhen. before reform, chiwan could only be reached by way of a boat launched from shekou, heading north up the pearl river. today, chiwan is easily accessible by the 226 or 355, but still retains something of a backwater feel. indeed, chiwan has the scruffy feel of a potentially hip artist colony, except for the lack of artists and the vanishing coastline.

that said, chiwan is fun because it also boasts some of the oldest sites in shenzhen – the tianhou temple (technically the oldest in the area. zheng he reputedly stopped here, and emperors from the ming and qing gifted stele to commemorate upgrades and rennovations (!) to the temple). chiwan is also site of the grave of the last song emperor – a child who was drown with and by a loyal follower so he would not be dishonored by the yuan. the little emperor’s tomb is maintained by the zhao family.

hop, hop.

shenzhen university misty afternoon

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lychee

Originally uploaded by maryannodonnell

had one of those delicious afternoons when the beauty despite blossomed. more snaps of shenzhen university trees, here.

History as Farce

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As part of our book club discussion (see previous entry), Liu Jingwen handed out copies of a recent blog entry by Yang Hengjun (杨恒均) entitled “Ten Years of Cultural Revolution and Ten Years of the Internet: Where Do We Go From Here? (十年文革与十年互联网：我们向何处去？)” In the rest of this entry, I will translate some of the more interesting passages from Yang’s (much longer) essay. I hope this synopsis + citations will contribute to understanding about historic continuities between Maoism and what followed.

Yang Hengjun is interested in comparing the first thirty years (1949-1979) and second thirty years (1979-2009) of the People’s Republic because he believes there are startling similarities between these two eras. He is particularly interested in the comparing the ten years of the Cultural Revolution with the ten years of the internet in China.

十年文革是建国六十年甚至是中国历史上少有的几个“大鸣大放”、“大民主”的时期，当时是以青年学生（甚至很多高中生）为主，知识分子中大部分已经从1957年的反右中吸取了教训，少部分没有吸取教训的从一开始就被打倒在地了。

互 联网十年里，也是以清一色的青年人为主，在虚拟的空间进行独立思考和自由言说。这时期的知识分子们一边从文革和上个世纪八十年代末的事件中吸取了教训，打 骨子里认同了沉默是金的理念；一边从改革开放中收获真金白银，忙于改善自己的生活，从物质和精神上都向官员靠拢。结果，青年人主导思考和言论成为十年文革和十年互联网最大的共同之处，同时也彰显了我们民族的困境：急需知识分子们启蒙和引导青年的时候，思考国家前途和民族命运的担子竟然落在了涉世未深的青年人的肩膀上。

The ten years of the Cultural Revolution was a rare period of “free airing of views” and “democracy” in the 60 year history of the People’s Republic, indeed in the entire history of China. The key players were young people (even high school students) as a majority of intellectuals had already learned their lesson from the 1957 anti-rightism movement and the majority who hadn’t learned their lesson were beaten early on.

Young people again have been the key players during the ten years of the internet, conducting independent thought and free speech in virtual space. On the one hand, this era’s intellectuals have learned their lesson from the Cultural Revolution and the events of the late 80s, and believe in their bones that silence is golden. On the other hand, they have gotten rich during reform, keep busy improving their lives, and their material and spiritual interests overlap with those of officials. Thus, the primary importance of young people in leading thinking and debate is the greatest similarity between the ten years of the Cultural Revolution and the ten years of the internet. This also shows our people’s predicament: at the time when young people desperately need the enlightment and direction of intellectuals,  the responsibility for contemplating the country’s future and the people’s fate has been unexpectly thrust onto their inexperienced shoulders. Continue reading →

Book Club Blues

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On December 26, Mao’s birthday, our book club gathered to discuss a recent translation of Wang Shaoguang’s The Failure of Charisma: The Cultural Revolution in Wuhan (1995 Hong Kong University Press; translated in 2009: 王绍光 超凡领袖的挫败–文化大革命在武汉 the 80’s.). We were of several generations – the late 1950’s, 60’s, a couple from the 70’s, and a few from the 80’s.Liu Jingwen, member of the 80’s cohort led and organized the discussion.

What was striking about the conversation was the extent to which generational experience continued to dominate the conversation not just because 50’s and 60’s participants could claim personal experience of the Cultural Revolution, but also because of the relative value of political ideology amongst the different cohorts. Crudely speaking, the older the participant, the stronger was the conviction that collective politics is a pressing matter. Likewise, the younger the participant, the more likely s/he was to express surprise/ interest in/ confusion about the  older generation’s valuation of politics.

How and why the Cultural Revolution continues to matter in Shenzhen are pressing questions because Shenzhen was (arguable) the last of the great social experiments from the first thirty years of the People’s Republic. Deng Xiaoping mobilized intellectuals, cadres, and the engineering corps to leave their cities and “cut open a road of blood (杀出一条血路)” or “feel your way across the river (莫这石头渡河),” depending on the relative militarism of one’s ideological commitments – and yes, Deng was militaristic, but it was also a society saturated by martial metaphors. [Deng Xiaoping’s road of blood inevitably makes me wonder, ‘whose blood’ and ‘how much is needed’?]

Importantly, both the road of blood and the river crossed convey the idea of movement – road to where? Crossing which river? Of course in Shenzhen circa 1978, these questions have concrete answers – roads to Hong Kong at Wenjindu and Luohu and a ferry to Hong Kong at Shekou, respectively. But the also entailed hope and an orientation to the future – a new kind of modernity and xiaokang for every Chinese citizen. In other words, the values that infused the establishment of Shenzhen were the values espoused by many during the Cultural Revolution. This connection is even clearer when we take into account the extent to which freedom and proceedural justice were fundamental to the establishment and prominance of Shekou during the 1980s.

What came out of our conversation was how much history has been disappeared not only in terms of relative knowledge, but also in terms of the scope of the debate. Throughout the discussion,  I was struck by the similarity of the debate to American debates about Vietnam. Most of us don’t know enough to do more than debate the relative value of soundbites, rather than analyze and evaluate events and consequences. Moreover, instead of figuring out shared principals on which to base our analyses and evaluations, we end up comparing levels of personal experience – an important part of historical recovery and recognition of ignored lives, but insufficient to the task of building bridges if (and when) experience (or its lack) become the terms for inclusion in the discussion.

I came to two conclusions after three hours of debate: (1) we need an education that will enable us to transform ourselves and future generations into people who can contribute intelligently AND compassionately to social debate and action and (2) we need to get beyond complacent acceptance of business as usual, let alone celebrating Shenzhen’s successful establishment of hypercapitalism. As we left the coffee shop, one of the 50’s participants said to me, “And we still haven’t done anything in Shenzhen (深圳还没动手!)” Perpetual revolution, indeed.

Another Walk in Shenzhen

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Poet Steven Schroeder and I have collaborated to create A Walk in Shenzhen II. The original Walk took place four years ago, 2005.

shenzhen bay 27 dec 2009

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today i walked from the poly center at coastal city to circumambulate the construction site of the shenzhen bay sports center. i have started the walk with a that was then moment in 2003, which is today the point where haide 3rd road opens into houhai landfill in front of the kempinski hotel (now open for business). i started the walk from that same position today. the differences between the first and second pictures is only 6 years – but in terms of the production of real estate and growing air pollution problem it feels a lifetime; certainly another world. visit gallery to take the walk.