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.

storm clouds

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tianmian clouds

these past two weeks, it has rained in shenzhen and the rest of the delta. on friday the 13th (!), the rains flooded baoan district, killed six, and delayed airflights. songgang was the worst hit. that night, storm water also pooled throughout the city and public transportation stopped, causing hundreds to wade home.

in between the downpours, however, the cloud formations have been stunning. pictures from tianmian, dongmen (hubei new village), huaqiangbei, and houhai.

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.

listening to tibet talk

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The other afternoon, I joined several of my closest friends for a dim sum lunch. We gathered to welcome home a beautiful young woman, who had just graduated from university in England and was preparing to work in Hong Kong. And there, in the middle of the table, a plate of Sharon Stone’s comments on Tibet had been unexpectedly added to the baskets of shrimp dumplings, savory chicken feet, our favorite poached vegetables, sautéed baby clams, steamed pork ribs, stir-fried rice cakes, and honey-pork buns.

None of us resisted the sharp pleasure of eating those piquant words. Each syllable stung our lips and stimulated our tongues, momentarily appeasing our shared desire to taste rare and exceptional flavors.

At first, the words “Tibet, earthquake, Karma” hummed pleasantly in my mouth. As I swallowed, I could feel a warm self-righteousness accumulating at the pit of my stomach. I felt nourished. Strengthened. Emboldened. Indeed, those words gave me the sense of wellbeing that only a sense of justified superiority can impart. But then, my jaw tightened and I could feel my fingers clenching the tablecloth. Unable to digest the confusion and anger that spiced Sharon Stone’s remarks, I had unknowingly poisoned myself.

My friends fared no better. They too seemed unusually agitated. Like me, the more Tibet they ate, the more venom they regurgitated. Together, we dined on escalating anger. Fortunately, just as platters of “lost in translation” and “Chinese domestic affairs” had been served, our young friend arrived. We put down our chopsticks to greet her. Our genuine happiness to see her was the antidote to the unthinking ingestion of more “Dalai Lama likes me but he doesn’t like you”, and all of us were able to withstand the temptations of gorging on “Chinese netizens in action”.

In retrospect, it frightens me how quickly and how easily Tibet galvanized our negative emotions. None of us said anything that hadn’t been said before; we simply rehashed arguments that we had heard in other conversations and read in other contexts. I remember saying something about “it’s ridiculous to blame Tibetan Buddhists for the stupidity of Hollywood actors.” I think one of my friends mentioned, “You westerners carry on about human rights, but don’t care about historical slavery in Tibet.” Someone else pointed out that, “Tibetans and all ethnic minorities have more rights than we Han Chinese.” Bland and half-baked, our actual dialogue shed no new light the issue. Instead, talking about Tibet provided a form and justification for venting emotions that in other contexts would be blamed.

My behavior at that lunch shames me because when talking about Tibet, I not only gave over to feelings of anger and contempt, but also directed the negative force of those feelings at good friends. This is enough food for thought to make me wonder if I’ve ever had a conversation about Tibet that was actually about Tibet. It also has me rethinking the quality of my interactions with those less near and dear. What would I say in situations where I didn’t care about my interlocutors? How far would I go to make it impossible for others to disprove my words? I was so sure of the irrefutable truth of my statements that I didn’t bother to listen to my friends. I now wonder; if I had listened, what else I might have heard both in my friends’ contentions and my own assertions? And would true listening have achieved more than mere talk?

harmonic pizza: the usefulness of cultural disorientation

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foreigners in shenzhen devote hours to discussing “the chinese” and what makes them tick. more often than not, the conversion circles around the very practical questions of how to make friends, how to work together, and how to feel more part of the urban scene in the face of experienced and actual failures to make friends, to cooperate, and to integrate oneself into shenzhen.

euro-american foreigners often refer to “the fact that chinese people are more group oriented than we are” to explain their discomfort in establishing, cultivating, and maintaining relationships with chinese friends and colleagues. on the face of it, one would think that it would be easier to enter relationships with people who use interaction as a chance to demonstrate their commitment to a relationship than it is to make friends with people who use the relationship as an opportunity to express their individuality. but apparently not. many euro-american foreigners experience chinese commitment to the relationship as a kind of duplicity. true friends, they say, are themselves, rather than pretending to be someone just so you’ll like them.

an american friend told the following story to illustrate her discomfort in relationships with chinese people. although she eats chinese food, she can’t eat it every meal, and often likes to have western food, especially pizza. one of her chinese friends invited her out for pizza. while enjoying her second slice, the american suddenly realized that her friend wasn’t eating. when she asked why not, her friend said she wasn’t hungry. however, my friend persisted: you don’t really like pizza, do you? she asked. her friend admitted that she would have something else to eat once she went home. this exchange ruined the happy feeling my friend had felt just a few seconds before.

“why didn’t she tell me she didn’t like pizza?” my friend asked, truly confused.

“but you like pizza,” i said. “you’re the guest. why wouldn’t she take you out for food that you like?”

i admitted that i not only realize my chinese friends cater to my tastes, but also (when asked) state unequivocally what i like to eat.

“it gives me a childlike charm,” i joked.

my friend glared and then said, “anyway, i can’t go out for pizza with her anymore. i can’t force people to do what they don’t like to do just because i like it.”

“i don’t force anyone,” i clarified, “if asked, i don’t equivocate.”

my friend laughed, but repeated that she couldn’t eat pizza with people who didn’t like it, especially if they were paying for it. i gulped and held my tongue. when broke and hungry, i frequently show up on a friend’s doorstep and have them feed me. just last night, for example, i had a friend take me out for spaghetti at my favorite italian restaurant. now my friend prefers chinese food, but it wasn’t that difficult to order dishes that all of us could enjoy, and after ordering a range of meats, vegetables, risottos and spaghettis, we organized all the entries in the center of the table, and ate family style–little of this, little of that, a little more of that and that and that…

…but to return to the question of negotiating cultural difference. my friend and her chinese friend had gone to dinner with the same intention–to deepen their connection. however, for my american friend, the pizza dinner was an expression of individual taste; she was looking to see if she and her chinese friend had something in common. however, her chinese friend was offering her something she thought she would like to show her commitment to the relationship. thus, as neither approached the dinner in the same way, they ended up in an impasse, which has come to define their relationship. on the one hand, they both like each other and want a better relationship. on the other hand, neither has figured out what the next step should be, so they sometimes meet for coffee, each feeling a slight regret that they haven’t yet brought the relationship to where they once hoped it would go.

any euro-american living in china has similar stories; suddenly, we find ourselves unable to interpret what is happening and thus incapable of acting in ways that will help us realize our intentions, which are often unhelpfully vague. this experience, especially when repeated, can be discouraging, frustrating, and often alienating. more often than not, we gloss these moments as examples of culture shock or difference, and leave it at that, moving on to the next awkward dinner and inevitable conversation with compatriots about “what makes the chinese tick?”

at times like this, i think the concept of “culture” does more harm than good; if our intention is to improve the quality of dinner with friends, we don’t need to imagine that the great monolith of chinese culture looms overhead, casting a deep and impenetrable shadow. we need neither to read ethnography, nor to memorize lists of cultural traits. we don’t even have to read the introduction to chinese culture, which prefaces the guidebooks many of us keep on our bookshelves. we can definitely do without comparing stories of cultural misunderstanding, duplicity, and heartbreak. in short, we need to stop playing the intellectual equivalent of collecting and trading baseball cards, and get on with the serious work of figuring out why we are here, despite all our moaning about cultural difference.

making culture an abstract concept that we apprehend intellectually hinders more than it helps the cultivation of specific friendships because it focuses on general types, rather than the person sitting with us. instead, i believe that it is more useful to approach these moments of disorientation as opportunities to examine our own assumptions about what we are doing, and modify them so that we can achieve our goals with less friction and more joy. if necessary, we may also have to look at what it is we intend to achieve through a specific interaction, in which case, it is our goals that need to be reevaluated.

once we take take cultural disorientation as a chance to clarify our actions and motives, there are suddenly all kinds of opportunities to grow friendships, improve cooperation, and integrate oneself into new communities, both at home and across the so-called east-west divide. reframed as self-examination or cultural critique, the intellectual study of cultural suddenly provides all sorts of benefits. indeed, one of the great benefits of living abroad is that more often than at home, daily life disrupts our taken-for-granted assumptions, inviting us first to rethink the world as we know it and then, by cultivating more skillful practices, to transform it.

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.