Tag Archives: globalization

Thinking Macau

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Happy serendipity. I have been trying to make sense of my superficial impressions of Macau and this morning, a former student pointed me to the article, Capital Flight of China’s Wealthy Gets Ready for Takeoff. Long story short — using credit card purchases to transfer Chinese savings into international accounts. If this loophole sounds suspiciously like the money laundering another friend attributed to Yongfengyuan, that’s probably because the same group of people are involved: China’s officials and/or those with business ties to the current administration.

What have I seen and overheard? Continue reading →

突破：what is a break through?

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Lately, I have been thinking about how each of Shenzhen’s six officially lauded break throughs appears as an instance of slogan warfare. Concomitantly, I have thinking about creative destruction, both Marxist and neo-liberal variants. Roughly speaking, Marx defined creative destruction as the necessary destruction of property and means of production (including social relations) so that new wealth could be generated. In contrast, neo-liberal economists like Joseph Schumpeter have tended to define creative destruction in terms of innovation. A question of emphasis that also beats at the heart of moral value: Marx witnessed destruction and its fallout; Schumpeter saw innovation and its benefits.

So below, a brief survey of Shenzhen breakthroughs to track the shift from socialist to neoliberal political morality. As Marx and Schumpeter indicate, none of these break throughs have been morally neutral, legitimating both new forms of inequality and opportunity. Continue reading →

impressions of shenzhen north station

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Visited the new Shenzhen North Station (深圳北站) and it is as overwhelming as intended (my friend said that he had heard that the city aimed to construct the best train station in Asia, and then when I mentioned this description to another friend, he commented, “so it’s the largest in Asia, right?”) So yes, another complex of landmark buildings that seems to dissolve into the relentless shuffle of state of the art stadiums, ever-taller buildings, and more imposing public spaces and has me wondering if Shenzhen might be best experienced as an architectural museum – with all that such a characterization implies, including a general (global?) indifference to museum pieces except as collector’s items. Impressions below.

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of smog, environmental and political

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As the Universiade closed, Shenzhen’s clear skies and bright sun caused a friend to jokingly speculate that, “Even Heaven is cooperating with the Municipal Government [to put on a great universiade]”. Nevertheless, a mere 24 hours after the Universiade closing ceremony, the smog was back. And yes, it rained yesterday, so there were cloudy grey skies, but. The smog is back.

Alas, the smog is not only environmental. I remain unclear as to why Longgang’s “Crystal (水晶石)” stadium not only lost the opening ceremony to Nanshan’s “Silkworm Cocoon (春茧),” but also lost the closing ceremony to the Window of the World theme park. Now, I can understand moving the opening ceremony to the Cocoon because the stadium has been explicitly heralded as the perfect match to Beijing’s Nest, allowing Shenzhen leaders to deploy universiade internationalism to assert the Municipality’s position within domestic politics。 However, why move the closing ceremony from a state of the art, technically cutting age sports stadium to an aging theme park? This decision baffles me.

According to closing ceremony directory, Luo Wei, the venue for the closing ceremony was moved six times and the program was changed 45 times. He expressed dismay at the process until Guangdong Provincial Party Committee Secretary, Wang Yang (汪洋) reminded him that the Window of the World theme park boasts beautiful reproductions of famous global tourist spots and that the closing ceremony would be a huge party for all Shenzhen’s international friends to go wild.

And there’s the rub. Shenzhen’s boosterism not withstanding, both the Central Government and Guangdong Province have participated in staging the Universiade and in that shuffle, Longgang District, which remains the poorest and least developed of Shenzhen’s Districts, lost the opportunity to take center stage in an international event. Nevertheless, they’re footing the bill for constructing the Olympic Village. Such are the inequalities of “face projects (面子工程)”. Sigh.

a facelift is only skin deep: dongmen

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Universiade facelifts continue and, along certain paths in the city – the global, neoliberal, middle class paths – one walks through rubble under tarps and past construction sites. Nevertheless, several steps off those intended tracks, life continues undisturbed by visions of what Shenzhen leaders think foreigners / outsiders should see. The effect of this selective construction is to further isolate pockets of working class ordinariness and transform it into unsightly poverty. In fact, one of the reasons urban villages are as such is because the city grew up around them, closing them in, and distorting their relationship to greater landscape. Thirty odd years ago, a village was a tight cluster of single story story houses and narrow paths in the midst of rice paddies, streams, orchards, and small docks that opened to either the Pearl River or the South China Sea; today an urban village is a tight cluster of three to eight story rentals that hum in the shadows of thirty story apartment complexes and postmodern skyscrapers even as the sea recedes.

Below, a walk through Dongmen, Hubei New Village, and Old Luohu work unit neighborhoods, begging the question: if what we see is what we get, why aren’t we learning to look more deeply?

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原创－the sz cultural industries fair

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The Seventh Shenzhen Cultural Industries Fair (文博会) opened three days ago. Of note is the ongoing institutionalization of types of creativity; by Hall theme, various Shenzhen ministries recognize and promote the following types of cultural industry:

  1. Integrate Culture and Science and technology, Advance Industry and Market Development 文化与科技相融合，产业与市场相促进
  2. Creativity, Taste, Life 创意 • 品味 • 生活
  3. New Media, New Life, New Future 新媒体 • 新生活 • 新未来
  4. Inheritance, Craft, Products, Preservation 传承•技艺•产品•保护
  5. [No Hall 5]
  6. Design, Branding, Quality 设计 • 品牌 • 价值
  7. News Publications 新闻出版馆
  8. Culture, Collision, Exchange 文化·碰撞·交融
  9. Creativity, Challenge, Going Beyond 创意·挑战·跨越

Continue reading →

Woody Watson’s forty years on the other side of the border

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I’ve just finished reading James Watson’s piece “Forty Years on the Border: Hong Kong / China” and am struck by the ongoing creation of national culture throughout the area, even before the establishment of the SEZ and concomitant migration deepened this trend. Consider Watson’s description of the Lok Ma Chau Lookout:

Stretched out in front of us is a meandering, muddy creek that constitutes the border, or what the British called “the Frontier.” On the south side, in the British zone, is a set of three, steel-link fences, topped with barbed wire. One hundred yards back from the fence are gun emplacements for Gurkha troops. Land Rovers filled with Scots Guards and the Black Watch drive by, along single-lane roads. British regiments are in full battle garb; weapons are on loaded and ready. Continue reading →

If even the Japanese can become refugees, what should China’s mortgage slaves do?

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The sight of Japanese refugees has forced us to rethink global modernity because if Japan’s house of cards can fall, then none of us are safe. Below, I’ve translated Yang Qian’s thoughts. Chinese version follows. Also, in Mandarin the term “房奴” literally means “house slaves”, however because the term refers to people who have been enslaved by their mortgage debt, I’ve used the expression mortgage slave. If anyone has a better translation, please advise.

If even the Japanese can become refugees, what should China’s mortgage slaves do?

By Yang Qian

The fact of Japanese refugees is something we’re not used to.

For Chinese people, we’re not surprised to see refugee centers and camps in Africa, the near East, or countries like the Balkans. While famine, drought, and panic cause people to loose their homes or even die of sickness in war torn places like Somalia, Pakistan, Chechnya, and Afghanistan. In these places, it’s not strange at all to see ordinary people take on extraordinary suffering. But who ever imagined that refugee camps would appear overnight in Japan, once the second richest country in the world, where 100s of thousands of people struggle with hunger and death? Continue reading →

border crossing

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Yesterday, custom officials at Seatac detained my husband in order to convince him to surrender his Green Card because they said that holding a Green Card was a privilege rather than his right. They maintained that a Green Card only gave a foreign national the privilege of residing in the United States because a Green Card is not a “travel document”. Their language use implied that as a Green Card holder my husband did not have the right to freely enter and leave the United States. However, when my husband and I entered Seattle, we had been abroad roughly half a year, well under the one-year time limit on overseas stays for Green Card holders. In other words, my husband had the legal right to freely enter the United States. Thus, the officers had to convince my husband to surrender his Green Card because it could not be revoked legally.

I am distressed and saddened by yesterday’s events. I am distressed because by choosing to interpret my husband’s right to freely enter and leave the United States as privilege, the officers chose to undermine my husband’s legal rights, rights in which all Americans have enshrined in the Constitution. I am saddened because those same actions imply that the officers also chose to close American borders to my husband without considering that there are many ways of being an American family in a globalizing world.

capitalist crises, news induced ADD, and making sense of the world

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I’m reading Bateson reading Margaret Mead:

Dr. Mead’s contribution consists in this—that she, fortified by comparative study of other cultures, has been able to transcend the habits of thought current in her own culture and has been able to say virtually this: “Before we apply social science to our own national affairs, we must re-examine and change our habits of thought on the subject of means and ends. We have learnt, in our cultural setting, to classify behavior into `means’ and `ends’ and if we go on defining ends as separate from means and apply the social sciences as crudely instrumental means, using the recipes of science to manipulate people, we shall arrive at a totalitarian rather than a democratic system of life.” The solution which she offers is that we look for the “direction,” and “values” implicit in the means, rather than looking ahead to a blueprinted goal and thinking of this goal as justifying or not justifying manipulative means. We have to find the value of a planned act implicit in and simultaneous with the act itself, not separate from it in the sense that the act would derive its value from reference to a future end or goal. Dr. Mead’s paper is, in fact, not a direct preachment about ends and means; she does not say that ends either do or do not justify the means. She is talking not directly about ends and means, but about the way we tend to think about ways and means, and about the dangers inherent in our habit of thought.

Lovely.

And on to thoughts inspired by the ever relevant Steps to an Ecology of Mind.

Roughly nine months ago, Shenzhen news media reported on the quicksand building incident (楼陷陷事件) and then a month later on the Foxcomm Suicides (富士康跳楼事件). Character by character, 楼陷陷 means “building trap trap,” however I’ve translated as “quicksand buildings” because the term referred to buildings that were literally sinking into reclaimed land in Houhai, Qianhai, and the Baoan Center District. At the time, both incidents received much Shenzhen press, although Foxcomm ultimately eclisped quicksand, both in Chinese and English. Indeed, I haven’t noticed any English press on the quicksand building incident and would appreciate links and/or references.

There are many possible explanations for the focus on Foxcomm rather than quicksand. Continue reading →