Tag Archives: baishizhou

laying siege to the villages: baishizhou

Posted on by
A FIVE-PART ESSAY, “LAYING SIEGE TO THE VILLAGES” HAS BEEN PUBLISHED ONLINE AT OPEN DEMOCRACY. HERE’S PART FIVE, WHICH DISCUSSES INFORMAL URBANIZATION AND THE CREATION OF NEIGHBORHOODS FOR AND BY THE WORKING POOR.

5. Baishizhou: Neighborhoods for the Working Poor

As of 2013, Baishizhou was the largest of the so-called urban villages in Shenzhen’s inner districts. With respect to the overall layout of Shenzhen, Baishizhou occupied both the southern and northern sides of Shennan Middle Road, at peripheries of both Luohu (moving west) and the Nantou Peninsula (moving north), making it one of the most centrally located transit centers in the inner districts (map 8). As of 2013, Baishizhou had a total area of 7.4 km2 and an estimated population of 140,000 residents, of whom roughly 20,000 held Shenzhen hukou and 1,880 were locals. The population density of Baishizhou had breached 18,900 people per square kilometer, more twice that of municipal average of 7,500 people per square kilometer, a statistic which in 2012 had made Shenzhen the fifth most densely populated city on the planet. There were 2,340 low and mid-rise buildings in the area, with an estimated 35,000 units. Monthly rents ranged from 700 to 3,000 rmb, which were significantly cheaper than in neighboring Overseas Chinese Town (OCT) or nearby housing estates, where a “cheap” apartment could rent for 4,000 rmb.

master plan

Map 8: Location of Baishizhou, 1996 Master Plan

Many of the garbage collectors for the area live in the cheapest rentals, rural Mao-era dormitories where it is possible for three workers to share a 30 m2 dorm room for 200 rmb a head, plus electricity and water. Old Cai, for example, was 65 years old, when interviewed. He came to Shenzhen after retirement because his monthly pension is 40 rmb per month, but he and his wife need 20,000 rmb annually, or about 1,700 a month to meet their expenses. In Baishizhou, he makes a living collecting and reselling cardboard boxes and other garbage. He says he can save money this way because although there’s no real profit, he makes enough to support himself and to bring a little home for Chinese New Year. However, the diversity of Baishizhou residents also includes working families who have lived in the area since migrating to Shenzhen over twenty years ago and young professionals who are sharing their first flat independent of their families. One family from Sichuan, for example, rents a 60 m2 two bedroom apartment for 1,700 rmb a month, which the husband, his wife, her mother-in-law, and their two children share. During the day, the parents work at one of the OCT themeparks, while the mother-in-law takes care of the children and housework. In addition, many of Shenzhen’s young designers and architects who work in the OCT Loft, a renovated factory area for creative industry live in higher-end handshake buildings, which sometimes include parking space for a car.

In addition to rental properties, the first floor of most Baishizhou buildings was used for commercial purposes and the area boasted several commercial streets, at least two night markets and entertainment areas, in addition to independent vendors and office space for independent carpenters, builders, and handymen. There was an elementary school and several nursery schools. Moreover, in between two of the abandoned factories of the Shahe Industrial Park enterprising migrants have set up the Baishizhou Pedestrian Street, which mimics the Dongmen Walking Street. There are food stalls and toy vendors, and several juvenile rides.

Clearly, using the term “village” to describe this level of settlement density and diversity is misleading – Baishizhou is a vibrant urban area composed of five neighborhoods – Baishizhou, Shangbaishi, Xiabaishi, Xintang and Tangtou, which under Mao had been organized into a state-owned agricultural collective, Shahe Farm. In the early 1980s, 12.5 km2 area of the Shahe Farm was partitioned into two enterprise areas – Overseas Chinese Town in the eastern section and Shahe Enterprises in the western section. In the mid-1980s, both OCT and Shahe built factories for assembly manufacturing. However, the management teams and access to investment capital were significantly different. OCT was a state-owned enterprise and its management team educated professionals from China’s major cities. In contrast, the former collective leaders managed Shahe and its development. In the post Tian’anmen era when Shenzhen’s low-tech low cost manufacturing had ceased to be as profitable as during the 1980s, OCT developed themeparks – Splendid China, Window of the World, and Happy Valley – to stimulate the economy. In turn, this investment also enhanced the rental value of the area and drove the redevelopment of the former industrial park into a Soho like creative area.

laying siege to the villages: lessons from shenzhen

Posted on by
An essay written for Open Democracy is now online. Here’s the introduction. Over the next few days, I will put up the sections on Nantou, Luohu-Dongmen, Xixiang, and Baishizhou.

Laying Siege to the Villages: Informal Urbanization in Shenzhen

Although Shenzhen is famous for its “urban villages” or “villages in the city” (城中村 chengzhongcun), nevertheless, in 2004 Shenzhen became the first Chinese city without villages. Full stop. This fact bears repeating: legally, there are no villages in Shenzhen. As of 2007, Shenzhen Municipality had a five-tiered bureaucracy consisting of the municipality (市shi), districts (市区shiqu), new districts (新区 xinqu), sub-districts or streets (街道jiedao), and communities (社区shequ). Since 2010, the Districts have been known as the inner districts and outer districts, reflecting when they were incorporated into the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone (SEZ) (Map 1).

 Administrative_Divisions_of_Shenzhen_City

Under Mao, rural areas were China’s revolutionary heart and “villages surrounded the city (农村围绕城市)” was an explicit political, economic, and social strategy for revolutionary change. The Mandarin expression “surrounds (围绕)” can also be translated as “lays siege to”, highlighting the rural basis of the Chinese Revolution. Early Chinese Communists had followed the Russian example and entered cities to organize workers. However, when Nationalist forces led by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek violently suppressed Communist organizations in Chinese cities the Communists retreated to the countryside. Moreover, communists and local people identified colonial ports such as Hong Kong with the proliferation of traitors, parasitic merchants, and corrupt officials. Consequently, while Marx claimed that modern history was the urbanization of the countryside, the Chinese revolution aimed to re-occupy and purify the cities. Beginning in 1927 until the occupation of Beijing in 1949, the Communists organized rural resistance to both Japanese invaders and Nationalist hegemony, literally surrounding the cities with an estimated 5 million rural soldiers.

The establishment of Shenzhen signaled the beginning of a new era in Chinese history – “cities surround the villages (城市围绕农村)”, an expression which Shenzhen urban planners and architects have self-consciously used to describe urbanization in the city. Historically, there were legally constituted villages in Shenzhen. The present ambiguity over the status of villages and villagers is a result of contradictions between Maoist economic planning and post-Mao liberalization policies. Under Mao, the country was segregated into rural and urban areas. In rural areas, villages were designated production teams and organized into work brigades that were administered by communes. Communes had to meet agricultural production quotas that financed industrial urbanization and socialist welfare policies in cities, which were tellingly defined as “not-agrarian (非农feinong)”. Importantly, the hukou or household registration policy literally kept people in place – the allocation of food, housing, jobs, and social welfare took place through hukou status. Food and grain coupons were city-specific, for example, and a Shanghai meat coupon could not be legally exchanged in a neighboring city, let alone Beijing. In rural areas, however, communes and production brigades provided neither food coupons nor housing to members. Instead, brigade members produced their own food (usually what was leftover after production quotas had been met) and built their own homes or rural dormitories as they were known in the Maoist system.

In 1979, when the Guangdong Provincial Government elevated Bao’an County to Shenzhen Municipality, the area was rural, and the majority of its 300,000 residents had household registration in one of 21 communes, which were further organized into 207 production brigades. However, hukou status notwithstanding, the integration of brigades and teams had not been complete and members continued to identify with traditional village identities. Although the names of Shenzhen’s current districts were the names of ten of the larger communes, for example, with the exception of Guangming, they were also historically the names of large villages that had been the headquarters for communes. In 1980, the Central government further liberalized economic policy in Shenzhen by establishing the area that bordered Hong Kong as a Special Economic Zone (SEZ). This internal border was known as “the second line”, in contrast to the Sino-British border at Hong Kong or “the first line”. The re-designation legalized industrial manufacturing and foreign investment (primarily from Hong Kong) in the new SEZ. Outside the second line, Shenzhen Municipality established New Bao’an County, which was still legally rural and administered through collective institutions.

The elevation of Bao’an County to Shenzhen Municipality created an anomalous situation within Socialist China because the administrative division of Shenzhen into the SEZ and New Bao’an County only legalized new economic measures; it did not transfer traditional land rights from brigades and teams to the new municipal government. Instead, the first task of urban work units that came to the SEZ was to negotiate the equitable transfer of land rights from the collectives to the urban state apparatus. The goal was to insure that rural workers would continue to have space for housing and enough land to ensure agricultural livelihoods. And this is where historical village identities reasserted themselves. In theory, the urban work units negotiated with brigade and team leaders to transfer the administration of land from the rural to the urban sector of the state apparatus. In turn, the brigades and teams would continue to produce food for the new urban settlements. In practice, however, brigade and team leaders acted on behalf of their natal villages and co-villagers, asserting a pre-revolutionary social identity.

The legal slippage between collective identity within China’s rural state apparatus and collective identity through membership in a traditional village arose because although the Constitution and subsequent Land Law of 1986 stated that rural farmland belonged to the collective, neither document went so far as to define what a collective actually was in law. Indeed, the difference between rural and urban property rights has been the foundation for post-Mao reforms, first in Shenzhen and then throughout the country. In 1982, the amended Constitution formally outlined the different property rights under rural and urban government. According to Article 8 of the Chinese Constitution:

Rural people’s communes, agricultural producers’ co-operatives, and other forms of co- operative economy such as producers’ supply and marketing, credit and consumers co-operatives, belong to the sector of socialist economy under collective ownership by the working people. Working people who are members of rural economic collectives have the right, within the limits prescribed by law, to farm private plots of cropland and hilly land, engage in household sideline production and raise privately owned livestock. The various forms of co-operative economy in the cities and towns, such as those in the handicraft, industrial, building, transport, commercial and service trades, all belong to the sector of socialist economy under collective ownership by the working people. The state protects the lawful rights and interests of the urban and rural economic collectives and encourages, guides and helps the growth of the collective economy.[1]

In contrast, according to Article 10, land in cities is owned by the State:

Land in the rural and suburban areas is owned by collectives except for those portions which belong to the state in accordance with the law; house sites and private plots of cropland and hilly land are also owned by collectives. The state may in the public interest take over land for its use in accordance with the law. No organization or individual may appropriate, buy, sell or lease land, or unlawfully transfer land in other ways. All organizations and individuals who use land must make rational use of the land.[2]

The contradiction between the fact that villages no longer have legal status in Shenzhen and their traditional claims to land rights and social status – both of which are recognized by Shenzhen officials and residents – has constituted a serious political challenge for Shenzhen officials, who have viewed the villages as impediments to “normal (正常)” urbanization. Officials have defined “normal” urbanization with respect to the Shenzhen’s Comprehensive Urban Plan, which has already gone through four editions (1982, 1986, 1996, and 2010). In other words, “normal” urbanization has referred either to formal urbanization or informal urbanization that has secured legal recognition. In contrast, Shenzhen’s urban villages emerged informally as local residents not only built rental properties to house the city’s booming migrant population, but also developed corporate industrial parks, commercial recreational and entertainment centers, and shopping streets. As of January 2013, for example, it was estimated that half of Shenzhen’s 15 million registered inhabitants lived in the villages. Moreover, these densely inhabited settlements also provided the physical infrastructure that has sustained the city’s extensive grey economy, including piecework manufacturing, spas and massage parlors, and cheap consumer goods.

In Shenzhen, urban villages have been the architectural form through which migrants and low-status citizens have claimed rights to the city. Importantly, informal urbanization in the villages has occurred both in dialogue with and in opposition to formally planned urbanization. On the one hand, informal urbanization in Shenzhen urban villages has ameliorated many of the more serious manifestations of urban blight that plague other boomtowns. Unlike Brazilian favelas, for example, Shenzhen urban villages are not located at the edge of the city, but rather distributed throughout the entire city and many urban villages occupy prime real estate. Consequently, Shenzhen’s urban villages have been integrated into the city’s infrastructure grid and receive water, electricity, and also have access to cheap and convenient public transportation. Moreover, as Shenzhen has liberalized its hukou laws, urban villages have also been where migrants have access to social services, including schools and medical clinics. Thus, Shenzhen’s urban villages have provided informal solutions to boomtown conditions. On the other hand, the lack of formal legal status of urban villages and by extension the residents of urban villages has allowed the Municipality to ignore residents’ rights to the city via the convenience of centrally located low-income neighborhoods. In fact, the ambiguous status of urban villages became even more vexed in 2007, when the Shenzhen government initiated a plan to renovate urban villages. It has been widely assumed that the government promulgated the new plan in order to benefit from the real estate value of urban village settlements. Critically, the Municipality’s plans for urban renovation compensated original villagers while ignoring the resettlement needs of migrant residents. Thus, the status of at least half of Shenzhen’s population suddenly entered into public discourse as it has become apparent that although the urban villages resulted from informal practices, nevertheless, they have been the basis for the city’s boom.

Ruralization: The Ideology of Global Inequality

Each of the sections in this essay explores the social antagonisms that have emerged through the transformation of Bao’an County into Shenzhen Municipality via informal urbanization in the villages. The point is that Shenzhen’s so-called urban villages are in fact urban neighborhoods that grew out of previous rural settlements through rapid industrial urbanization. Nevertheless, the designation of “rural” or “village” still clings to these neighborhoods, making them the target of renovation projects and ongoing calls for upgrades. In turn, these calls justify razing neighborhoods and displacing the working poor with upper and upper middle class residential and commercial areas. Recently, Caiwuwei was razed and rebuilt as the KK 100 Mall, while Dachong was razed and as of 2013 a new development under construction. Hubei, the old commercial center in Luohu has been designated as the next major area to be razed, while in late 2012, the Shenzhen Government and Lujing Developers announced their intention to raze and rebuild Baishizhou as a centrally located luxury development.

In Shenzhen, ruralization is primarily an ideological practice through which neighborhoods for the working poor and low-income families have been created by denying the urbanity of these neighborhoods and their residents. In this practice, the city’s rural history is invoked to demonstrate that neighborhoods which grew out of villages are continuations of the village, rather than the results of informal urbanization. Indeed, there are few actual remains of Shenzhen’s rural past. Instead, the target of official rural renovation projects are in fact the informal housing and industrial parks that were built roughly between the mid 1980s through 2004/5, when the municipal government began actively preventing informal construction.

In addition, I have included annotated maps and photographs that illustrate the spatial and social forms of these different contradictions have taken. With respect to recent Chinese history, this level of specificity aims to make salient how Shenzhen enabled national leaders to reform Mao’s rural revolution. With respect to contemporary research on mega-cities, this essay draws attention to the ways in which architectural forms have facilitated neoliberal urbanisms that exclude the poor from desired futures.

[1] Constitution of the People’s Republic of China (adopted on December 4, 1982), accessed at http://english.people.com.cn/constitution/constitution.html on February 26, 2013.

[2] Ibid.

luohu culture park: the antidote to mall-burbia

Posted on by

DSCI0079 I prefer early Shenzhen urban planning to the rush to mall-burbia that is the current trend. Early planning assumed small scale, low cost urban living that promoted street life. In contrast, mall-burban developments raze central areas of the city to build large scale, high cost gated communities and attached mall, where security guards keep out the riff raff, effectively suburbanizing densely populated urban areas.

Luohu Culture Park (罗湖文化公园) exemplifies the latent urbanity of early Shenzhen planning. The 2,000 sq meter park includes underutilized cultural infrastructure, a lake, and my favorite kind of public art — a sculpture that children can easily appropriate. Continue reading →

street life, baishizhou

Posted on by

Xintang and Shang Baishizhou lie northwesterly to Tangtou within the larger Baishizhou neighborhood. Where the allies widen into roads, a vibrant, bustling urbanity hints at unexpected encounters. The Baishizhou Pedestrian Commercial Street, the Baishizhou Christian Church, and inadvertent plazas, for example, speak to the social possibilities that high density street life creates.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

more community websites

Posted on by

Shenzhen long since gave up on “neighborhoods (居委会)” and “villages (村)”. Instead, the ruralized urban hybrids that the SEZ has spawned are legally known as “communities (社区)”. Note du jour is simply to point out that many of the sites connect landlords and renters. Soufun or “Search for a house” web, has sites that not only include rental information, but also track real estate prices. Guloucun — literally Old Lou Village Community (古楼村小区网) and Tianmiancun or Tianmian Village Community (田面村小区网), for example.

However, some community websites are more community oriented, in addition to providing a commercial forum. For the curious, checkout these community websites:

Shangsha and Xiasha Community Website (上下沙社区网)

Baishizhou Community Website (白石洲社区网)

as shenzhen razes: the baishizhou urban renewal plan online

Posted on by

Shenzhen developer, Lvgem Group (绿景集团) has uploaded a video of the Urban Renewal Plan for the Five Shahe Villages in Baishizhou (白石洲沙河五村旧改专项规划).

Wow. Just wow. And not in the good way.

The current built environment of roughly 580,000 square meters will increase 10-fold, to 5.5 million square meters.

The argument for razing the current settlement and replacing it with high, high rises and skyscrapers is that Baishizhou villagers live in grungy unpleasant conditions that need to be upgraded. The proposed solution is for the developers will work with villagers in order to bring them into the urbanization process.

In a nutshell,  the problem is that the video conflates the idea of “villagers” with the ruralized current residents of Baishizhou. There will be a resettlement area for “villagers”, but who counts as a villager? The actual population of Baishizhou is over 140,000, of which 120,000 do not have Shenzhen hukou. So, inquiring minds want to know: is the plan calling for ten times the space to house the 20,000 residents who do have hukou? Or does “villager” only refer to the actual members of the five villages, which means we’re talking about less than 2,000 people with resettlement rights. And if that’s the case, who will live in all this new, upgraded, hyper-modern space after the current residents have been forced to leave?

A quick visit to 58 net reveals how cheap housing in Baishizhou is relative to the surrounding area. In fact, many young office workers and professionals from neighboring Science and Technology Park (科技园) also live in Baishizhou as to designers and creative talents who work in the OCT Loft. Providing this class with livable (宜居) housing is an ongoing Shenzhen concern. Indeed, there is now an official plaque for hanging on a rental building which confirms a building’s livability.

It is estimated that over half Shenzhen’s population live in the villages, which account for roughly 10% of the area’s land. Arguably, the villages are the city, while high end housing estates and neighborhoods might be thought as wealthy suburbs, with lovely gardens and huge tracks of private spaces. Consequently, the question of who actually belongs to an “urban village” is the social, political, economic question because as Jonathan Bach has argued, the villages have been the incubators where (some of) Shenzhen’s migrant workers transform themselves into urbanites and potentially citizens.

As Shenzhen razes. Stay tuned.

egalitarian architecture

Posted on by

One of the more interesting architectural continuities between Maoist Tangtou and Handshake Baishizhou is the ideology of egalitarianism (平均主义).

When Tangtou villagers first came to Baishizhou in 1959, they gave up their rural status and became members of the Shahe Farm (沙河农场). As members of the Farm, their hukou status was “non-rural (非农)”. This meant that they had rights to socialist welfare benefits, including housing, a salary, a rice allocation, and education for their children. In turn, they gave up their land rights. All this, even though they continued to do agricultural labor. Thus, as a architectural typology, Tangtou’s flat houses were not rural buildings — traditional or modern — but rather socialist dormitories.

According to the Maoist planned economy, non-rural members of socialist work units were entitled to dormitory housing, or “one houselhold, one room (一户一间)”. Within these dormitories, all facilities were the same — the same size sleeping and communal areas, the same number of windows, and the same access to the collective canteen and outhouses, differences in family size, notwithstanding. This type of dormitory construction was the architectural manifestation of a larger egalitarian ideology.

Of course, architectural egalitarianism was relative to regions as well as local resources. For example, the dormitories that Tangtou villagers built in Baishizhou were one story structures made of cement admixtures, wooden beams, and Hakka technology. After the canteen system broke down, families constructed small stoves outside their front doors, but continued to share nearby outhouses and wells. In contrast, dormitories in cities ranged from buildings of stacked, one-room efficiencies with a bathroom at the end of the hallway to buildings of multiple room apartments. In the colder northern cities, the decision to turn on and off central heating for everyone in a dormitory was an extension of this theory as was the decision not to provide central heating to dormitories south of the Yangtze River.

The construction of urban villages in Shenzhen has been an extension of architectural egalitarianism in the post Mao era. All handshakes were built on plats of 10 X 10 meters. To insure equal access to sunlight, there is a mandatory distance of 3 meters on the east-west axis between buildings and a distance of 8 meters on the north south axis. This mandated layout is the basic grid of an urban village. Moreover, when juxtaposed against older settlements, including rural dormitories like Tangtou or village settlements at Hubei, for example, the layout of a handshake settlement extends and often further rationalizes the egalitarianism of the previous layout.

This form of development has brought with it two urban planning conundrums:

  1. The 10 X 10 grid, with its mandatory distances of 3 and 8 meters between buildings pre-empts the efforts to put in adequate roads. 3 meters is small enough that handshakes have grown closer together — albeit without touching — on the east-west axis. At the same time, 8 meters is only wide enough to accommodate one traffic lane, which often gets jammed during deliveries or when too many motorcycles dart through.
  2. Public space and access to main roads is at a premium within the settlements. At Tangtou, for example, the large basketball court in front of the 59 dormitories is the one large space, where children and older people can meet outside. At night this area becomes a night market with more business than those areas in the Baishizhou alleys. Likewise, the roads that connect Baishizhou to Shennan Road are also the most profitable because they have storefronts in areas with large numbers of pedestrians.

The ongoing ruralization of Tangtou (and other urban villages  neighborhoods) has had paradoxical ideological effects. On the one hand, thinking of Tangtou as rural empowered Tangtou residents to make handshake land grabs. On the other hand, thinking of Tangtou as rural continues to justify the exclusion of Tangtou residents from discussions of future development, differing to the expertise of “urban” intellectuals and authorities. Moreover, the urban planning problems presented by Tangtou are considered effects of “rural” and “traditional” thinking. However, Tangtou is as “rural” and as “traditional” as Greenwich Village, NYC. The current built environment of Mao-era dormitories and post Mao handshakes is itself a product of non-rural socialism, first as the Shahe Farm and then as the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone.

And there’s the rub: what does it mean that “rural” and “traditional” Tangtou Baishizhou has come to represent all that is good and problematic about Shenzhen’s “urban villages”?  More generally, what are we to make of Maoist egalitarianism — both its continued appeal to the broad masses of Chinese people and its problematic manifestations — when we confuse it with a Chinese past that never happened?

WoWorldly desires

Posted on by

Window of the World opened in 1984, on the auspicious day of 6.18 (June 18). Yesterday, I visited WoW with Constant Dullaart, one of the residents in this years OCT Art Residency. The featured image for this post is a snap of us in front of Niagara Falls.

This is the first time I’ve visited WoW since 1997, and was impressed by two of the new installations — a plane ride trip through the United States (installed 2004) and a toy train ride through mountainous Europe (June this year). The plane ride uses IMAX technology and moving seats to give the impression of flying coast to coast on a double wing plane. At each landmark, white Americans wave to visitors, yelling, “Welcome to the United States”; in watery areas, visitors are lightly spritzed with water. The toy train is less high-tech, but more popular with young children. According to one of the friendly staff members, these rides are part of plans to shift WoW entertainment from viewing miniature landscapes to interactive rides and activities; I’m thinking WoW goes Epcott.

I was struck not only by the yearning for elsewhere manifest in the WoW installations, but also by the continuing nostalgia for a particular kind of elite life. Tourism as an activity of early 20th century elites continues to shape built forms of this yearning. (Or perhaps we experience nostalgia in search of an object?) This neo-liberal appropriation of colonial forms of pleasure was also been reproduced at Shekou’s Seaworld, circa 1984, where the plaza houses western consumption in quaint buildings and the landlocked Shining Pearl.

Seaworld was one of the first efforts to materialize Chinese yearnings for the better (relentlessly global) life. Nevertheless, by the early 1990s, when WoW was built and developers put up European style estates (with appropriate tributes to Versailles excess), Shenzhen grappled to implement neo-liberal economic policies without neo-liberal political changes. The political-economy of both early Shekou and 1990s Shenzhen were reminiscent of early 20th century capitalism, when all sorts of material wealth began to appear, but only a few people were positioned to enjoy it. Or more to the point, perhaps, only a few elites had both the leisure and resources to enjoy it, including romantic alpine train rides and virtual plane rides on double wing planes a la the Wright brothers.

The fantasy life infusing representations of the early 20th century high life — the fashionable world — were a fixture of 1990s Shenzhen architecture. Seaworld and WoW, for example, were conceived and built in the post Tian’anmen era, when “European-style” housing estates were also popular, including OCTs upscale Portofino. In fact, throughout Shenzhen, but especially along Shennan Center Road, the mini-fascades that wrap WoW and Seaworld dreams have been enlarged in themed real estate developments, where many of Shenzhen’s solidly middling middle class still live and to which many migrants aspire.

Yesterday morning while waiting for Constant, I stood at the subway exit that is located beneath the Jiang Zemin inscribed glass pyramid and watched ticket scalpers approach tourists. The tourists spoke accented Mandarin, and had organized themselves into small groups of carefully dressed visitors. They examined the pamphlets, considered their options, and then opened their umbrellas to embark a rainy day of exploration. Those I later saw again within the park seemed to be enjoying themselves; I certainly enjoyed the toy train and virtual plane rides.

In recent years, of course, Shenzhen’s vision of the world has gone SciFi glassy — steeled if you will — against the imaginary onslaught of encounters with alien lives. However, that kind of elite consumption does not resonate with the same visceral pleasure of early 20th century elites enjoying both their traditional privileges and the mass produced delights of a new era. I’m trying to figure out why. Guess du jour: we want elite agency, but we want it as pleasure,in the play of tourism and leisurely meals, for example, rather than as the high stress, overwhelmed and overwhelming agency that seems to characterize elite life on the ninety-first story of a 21st century glass tower.

Postcards from my Alpine excursion, below:

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

aging in tangtou, baishizhou

Posted on by

This past week I have been listening to stories from the residents of the Tangtou row houses. Here is one:

Old Xu was born on November 12, 1945. In neidi, he was an accountant on a production team and then for the village enterprise.  After the redistribution of land during the household responsibility system, he and his wife did not receive enough land to farm cotton profitably. Consequently, his three children left to work elsewhere and the land has gone fallow except for a small vegetable plot.

Two years ago, Old Xu came to Shenzhen at the age of 65 because he did not want to burden his children with the cost of his retirement. His wife continues to live back home, taking care of their grandchild.His pension is only 30 or 40 rmb a month. Together, he and his wife need 20,000 rmb annually, or about 1,700 a month to meet their expenses. In Baishizhou, he makes a living collecting and reselling cardboard boxes and other garbage. He says he can save money this way because although there’s no real profit, he makes enough to support himself and to bring a little home for Chinese New Year.

At present Old Xu lives with two other old men in one of the 25+ square meter houses. This house is one of the cheaper in the settlement, with a rent of about 600 rmb a month plus water and electricity. His share is 200 rmb a month, or roughly 5 times his retirement pension back home. A bathroom has been added to the outside of the building. Inside, the space has been divided for sleeping and simple cooking.

When I asked him how the environment could be improved, Old Xu said that old people have no place to exercise. Instead, they just sit around talking, but that was the fastest way to an unhealthy old age! Old Xu also admitted that he was lonely because except for his roommates, he didn’t know anyone in the area. He then shrugged and asked rhetorically, “What can be done? If I go home, I can only become a burden for my children.”

tangtou research begins!

Posted on by

After many months of waiting and hoping and wishing (and yes research is often an overplayed love song), the CZC Special Forces have begun our research in Tangtou, Baishizhou. Yesterday morning and afternoon, we began a survey of the buildings.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.