Tag Archives: futian district

设计之都： graffiti art, shenzhen

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the new look of tianmian–city of design

it’s the third annual industrial arts fair in shenzhen. last year this time, fat bird did a series of improvised performances at the fair. this year, the fair came to tianmian! specifically, city of design, the ongoing project to upgrade old urban village shenzhen hosted the first three-city (guangzhou, hong kong, shenzhen) graffiti competition. a few pics, here.

now, i don’t know where or how these artists actually applied to compete; i haven’t seen any of the shenzhen artists’ work around the city. not that means anything in and of itself, much happens that i miss because i’m busy elsewhere. but. i’ve taken pictures of graffiti in the past. i’ve taken pictures of overpainting. but in over five years of walking and photographing the shenzhen, i haven’t seen any graffiti approaching the quality on display. interesting questions: where do these graffiti artists actually work? where are their other projects? will the city actually heed shenzhen t.v.’s call for more graffiti art throughout the city?

all this to call attention to the ways in which shenzhen continues its pursuit of culture in government approved forms. more specifically, its pursuit of culture as a viable economic investment. the industrial arts fair is the most obvious example. government regulation, promotion, and investment is also making dafencun into something of a brandname. this year, in tianmian graffiti art is being promoted as a happy alternative to industrial manufacturing as the livelihood of urban villages.

that said, fat bird’s most “successful” projects have been in collaboration with government entities. indeed, our next performance installation is also made possible by a government agency. we’re just paid less.

福华路：manifest history

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generations: alley connecting shennan and fuhua roads

walking along fuhua road toward the shenzhen traditional chinese medicine hospital, i suddently realized that in shenzhen history appears as absurd and often surreal juxtapositions of architectural styles. almost thirty years (actually 27, and yes, in shenzhen we count) into reform, it is possible to identify “eras”, which often came and went in less than five years. architectural examples from every era still stand, although some are being spruced up, and others have been razed, to be replaced by bigger, taller, and always more expensive structures. rarely do any of the buildings, let alone a street or neighborhood, seem to have been designed according to a common plan. the disorientation i feel when walking along roads like fuhua, which were built in the 1980s and early 90s and no longer fit into shenzhen du jour echoes the abrupt sensation of entering another city i have when turning from an upscale boulevard into a new village. fuhua was paved at a time when streets comformed to the lay of the land. shops and lowrise buildings therefore stand both above and below street level, the hills that once defined futian’s lychee orchards still beneath our feet. in visceral contrast, after 1995 it’s all flat lines. manifestations of shenzhen history, here.

福田保税区: containers: blooms

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container: blooms

administratively speaking, the term “shenzhen special economic zone” refers to nanshan, futian, luohu and yantian districts. baoan and longgang districts lay beyond what was once called the second line (二线) and is now more commonly referred to as outside the gate (关外). if memory serves, this linguistic shift took place several (2? 3?) years ago, echoing the loosening of border restrictions between the special economic zone and the rest of china. previously, chinese people needed special travel passes (通行证) to come to the sez. they also needed temporary residence permits (暂住证) to live and work here. to enjoy public benefits such as subsidized housing, medical care, and education for their children, they needed shenzhen household residency (深圳户口). as far as most chinese people were concerned, getting into the sez was like getting into a foreign country. thus, perhaps, the reason for another linguistic shift. very early into reform, shenzhen inhabitants (not all of whom were residents) started using the expression the interior (内地) not simply to refer to non-coastal regions (a question of relative geography), but also un-opened areas (a political-economic classification), including parts of guangdong.

(a word of warning on the use of words: when speaking mandarin, i have a tendency to use geographical terms from the perspective of shenzhen. this means i will say “the north (北方)” and mean “north of guangdong” and not “north of the yangtze,” which is more common in other parts of china. in the nineties, i actually heard shenzhen inhabitants refer to guangzhou as the interior, a classification few chinese in other cities would have come up with, let alone used in casual conversation. what’s interesting is that i use northern linguistic conventions when speaking in (admittedly americanized) english, where beijing seems to dominate our cognitive maps of china.)

what was special about shenzhen was that things could happen here that couldn’t happen elsewhere–factories built outside the national five-year plan, foreign investment on chinese soil, the creation of job and real estate markets, and the commodification of pleasure in ways that had once been condemned as bourgeois impediments to the revolution. the designation of land to meet particular political economic goals was common during the mao era. what was special about shenzhen, was that it was more about economic than political goals and this version of zoning spread quickly. in 1984, the government opened the fourteen coastal cities, in 1985 the three special deltas, and in 1992 much of the country.

all this reforming and opening of the interior meant that shenzhen was no longer special. clearly, after the death of deng and the ascension of jiang zemin, it became common to talk of shanghai, rather than shenzhen, as the harbinger of china’s global future. and so, shenzhen intensified the use of zoning to achieve economic competitiveness. at almost every administrative level (city, district, market town, street administration, and new village) as well as ministerial levels, shenzhen has opened various kinds of economic zones. some are simply new village factory areas and have no special status outside the village’s status, others are administratively recognized industrial and free trade zones with corresponding legal perks. thus, one of shenzhen’s three free trade zones, the futian district free trade zone abuts huanggang and shuiwei factory areas, which are roughly two kilometers from what will become the futian technology park.

saturday, i walked through the futian free trade zone. i was struck, once again, by the contradictions of development in shenzhen. this time specifically by that between industrial manufacturing and the city’s mandate to become a green city. the futian free trade zone aspires to be a garden in the midst of the city and in part succeeds. here, large buildings nestle behind landscapes of fake mountains and imported trees, while container trucks rumble down tree-lined boulevards. outside the barbed wire fence that separates shenzhen from hong kong, the shenzhen river burps up less methane than it did a few years ago. i photographed containers in bloom.

福田区: clearing a space for progress

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razed buildings continue to fascinate me. no doubt because i have now lived in shenzhen long enough to remember when many of these buildings were new; i certainly remember their older uses.

when i first arrived in 1995, the administrative structure of the shenzhen municipality had been recently upgraded from two (city-administrative area) to three (city-district-street) tiers. at the time, each district government added new buildings to the old building complexes in order to house the new departments and officials. at the same time, they began planning for new and improved district buildings, which were finished in the late 90s. at the time, the districts were faced with the tricky problem of what to do with the old buildings and land. they couldn’t sell it because no one dared buy it (what would happen if there was something wrong with the land or building? could the new owner successfully sue the government?). so they began to use the old buildings for government related functions: party schools, military quarters, and such.

in retrospect, it seems that not selling the land may have been the best investment the government could have made.

located at the intersection of shennan and huanggang roads, the land on which the previous futian government building complex stood has become more and more valuable since it was first constructed in the late 80’s and early 90s. in 2005, it was zoned to be a “silicon valley in the heart（空中硅谷)” of “futian’s golden area　（黄金地带”. indeed the government plans to invest 1.7 billion rmb to build a state of the art research center. accordingly, the district government has razed 24 buildings and moved all the residents and businesses that had located there after the government moved to its new location in the late 90s. so here are
pictures of the remains of a previous era.

莲花山：lianhua mountain park

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with friends, i climbed to the top of lianhua mountain park, where deng xiaoping strides purposely into the future.

well, perhaps not toward the future. he is afterall standing in place. nevertheless it is fair to say that because the land beneath him continues to shift, he’s no longer where he started. deng now both overlooks and synthesizes the meaning of the environmentally conscious central axis, as well as the ever more expensive real estate of futian, including huaqiangbei, the rainbow glass buildings of the financial district, the huanggang checkpoint, and numerous gated communities.

it’s hard to know if this exactly is what he intendend when he approved the construction of shenzhen. it’s pretty obvious, however, that this is what current leaders say he meant. accordingly, lianhua park commermorates deng’s 1984 southern tour, when he proclaimed that shenzhen demonstrated the correctness of reform and opening. the next political step, of course, was not toward city hall, but toward the fourteen coastal cities, which began learning from shenzhen. importantly, the practices associated with learning (学习) in china include emulation. so that “learning from shenzhen (学习深圳)”　directed leaders in other chinese cities to do what shenzhen had done: dismantle work units, bring in foreign capital, set up labor and housing markets, and build an international city.

sweating in the heat and humidity, we climbed past a kite flying field through the remnants of a lychee orchard and into a palm tree grove to arrive at deng’s monument. there, banyan trees and unbrellas protected most visitors from the sun, while a few others posed in front of deng and the engraved mural of deng xiaoping’s words, “the development and experiences of Shenzhen have proved the correctness of our policy on the establishment of special economic zones (深圳的发展和经验证明，我们建立经济特区的政策是正确的).” deng wrote and presented this inscription on January 26, 1984. at the pinnacle, the decision feels correct. it saturates my senses and suddenly the park, the views, and the easy pleasures of kite flying justify deepening reform. “everyone should have a nice park,” i think unreflexively.

as an early reform joke had it: deng xiaoping comes to a fork in the road. his driver asks, “what should we do.” deng answers, “signal left (toward socialism), but turn right (toward capitalism).”

and that’s the rub. i don’t know how seriously people take the deng statue and plaque, which celebrate a rather banal political message: brought to you by deng xiaoping and the ccp, reform and opening good! instead i worry that propaganda may be as sweet as an afternoon in the park. for the curious, a people’s daily article on the 1992 southern tour sketches the ideological importance of the 1984 southern tour with politically correct reverence.

summer fun

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the other day, yang qian and i walked from tianmian to the zhongxin plaza. we covered roughly two kilometres in slightly over one hour, stopping along the way to look at the memorial to sars heroes (lots of high-tech medical research and caring nurses), pose in front of bus stop advertisements (in this sense, irresistable), and check out what was happening curbside (an octopus floated in a tank and a man repaired a bicycle). we then stepped quickly past the women, who were using peddle sewing machines, like my grandmother used to use and my mother inherited to alter clothing, right there in the middle of our playground. and there’s the rub. shenzhen hasn’t zoned inequalityout of sight and mind, except during politically sensitive moments, when the poor are swept away. normally, the poor push back, crowding even those of us who like to think ourselves concerned. and we are concerned. just not all the time. just not that hot saturday afternoon when we wanted to play. so we put the camera away and ducked into an air-conditioned coffee shop, where our summer fun ended with a math lesson: one cup of coffee = hemming five pairs of jeans; one smoothie = six; a piece of cheesecake and one of walnut = five again. priceless.