Tag Archives: globalization

thoughts on multi-culturalism

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two events this week that have me thinking about the global mix in shenzhen.

event number one: a group of elementary teachers from xishuangbanna (yunnan) visited the school. this was interesting on several counts. first, they arrived in “native” costumes which they wore the entire week. as far as i could tell, they weren’t wearing traditional clothing, but actual costumes that one would wear on stage to perform one of china’s 56 ethnic groups. these costumes included christmas garland and plastic flowers to adorn the women’s hair. nevertheless, several of the han teachers told me that this is how ethnics dress, even when working in the fields. when i expressed sceptism, it was as if i had challenged something fundamental about being chinese.

“no, you don’t understand,” one of the teachers said, “they really are this simple and honest [my translation of the constant use of “朴实” to describe our guests].”

then, at dinner, the han official who led the delegation admitted that the yunnan minorities prefer to wear western clothing. he added that he constantly encouraged them to maintain their tradition in the face of modernization. now why ethnic minorities should be any different from the han, who don’t wear traditional clothing except when waitressing or making an artistic statement, i don’t know. however, i sensed that the official and his han audience felt an intense yearning for the minorities to be traditional.

so, during picture taking, the han all wanted their pictures taken with the minority teachers in costume. indeed, the han teachers borrowed the minority teachers’ hats for the pictures. for their part, the minority teachers wanted their picture taken with me, who wore chinos, a bright shirt with scalloped sleeves, and a hot pink scarf.

second, two fifth graders got into a fistfight because a mainland student called a korean student “hanguolao (韩国佬).” the teacher who reported this event to me was shocked.

“i thought our school was innocent and naive [my translation of “天真，简单” to describe children],” she said.

i was more surprised by her shock and obvious distress than i was by the fight. not surprised by the fight because (a) i’m a foreigner and so have more understanding of how foreigners experience chinese stereotyping than do chinese, (b) i read my students’ journals and know that many students have naturalized their mutual resentments through cultural difference, and (c) some little boys do try to resolve problems by fighting.

i was surprised by the teacher’s shock because i hadn’t realized how separate many of our teachers remain from the foreign students and teachers at the school. our student population is half foreign (including hong kong and taiwanese students), and there are eleven foreign teachers at the school. yet, it seems many of the han teachers really have no idea about the strangers in their midst. (this is of course the inverse on the foreigners who have no idea where they are!)

the xishuangbanna visit has me wondering about the ways in which we deploy stereotypes to bring coherence to new experiences that might otherwise open new understanding. for the xishuangbanna delegation as well as for the school’s teachers, this visit was something new. however, tourism to xishuangbanna informed how the minority teachers self-presented and were received. this emphasis was confirmed in the songs and dances that the teachers performed during their stay. most of the songs had already been translated into mandarin, and the dances were all “typical” of a generalized minority rather than specific to any one minority.

the fighting boys have me wondering about what lessons we are actually teaching our children. both knew the character “lao” was less human than “ren”. both experienced themselves as culturally distinct even though both had been classmates for several years, communicating in native mandarin. and neither had been taught more appropriate ways of handling conflict other than name calling and punching.

the other thing that i’ve noticed is that with the influx of foreigners and more ethnic minorities in shenzhen, there is emerging a more coherent sense of what a stereotypic shenzhener is: primarily mandarin speaking but fluent in cantonese; hip and urbane; aware of europe and america rather than the rest of asia. indeed, as far as i can tell, hong kong is no longer the shining star it once was and shenzheners are aiming to build a city that is vaguely western. previously, the fact that most migrants were han chinese from other provinces (or cities in guangdong) meant that most residents self-identified through hometowns. however a generation later, their children have a sense of themselves as belonging to an overarching chinese community that is defined mandarin (and therefore most do not think of themselves as being from guangdong), urban culture, and global dreams. this new identity is being simultaneously defined against stereotypes about rural china, guangdong, ethnic minorities, and large number of asian sojourners, whose presence is everyday stronger.

bienniale graffiti

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graffiti in shenzhen: high-end, high-concept, art

today walking around the biennale grounds, i noticed a graffiti exhibition. so again, as at tianmian (and it seems that some of the same graffiti artists have been commissioned here as a there), high quality graffiti gets shown in shenzhen as art, but does not exist throughout the city, which favors overpainting everything. this version of high-concept high-art urbanism is increasingly reshaping older industrial areas in the sez (关内). it is a version of shenzhen that grows out of and confirms the priority of architecture to the city’s self-representation. it also reiterates the importance of commercial art to the kind of culture that the city sponsors at the annual china (shenzhen) international cultural industry fair . it also fits that many of the folks at the bienniale are young and hip and artistic. i’m not sure if they represent a new kind of global elite, or it’s simply the case that the young hip and artistic global elite has finally landed in shenshen. graffiti pics here

urban form and memory

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joshua kauffman and gwendolyn floyd

the bienniale opens tonight. well, bienniale the third. but it’s my first. i missed the previous two. i’ve been hanging out at oct loft with fat bird and silo, and these past few weeks, with gwendolyn floyd and joshua kauffman, co-founders of regional, which they define as “an interdisciplinary design and research network that performs and applies original analysis of global society, culture and commerce, uncovering and developing opportunities for profitable innovation and meaningful cultural intervention.”

their installation is called “foreground”, which was built out of bamboo. the design is derived from GIS data of a recently removed shenzhen mountain ridge. over the past twenty years, shenzhen has aggressively reclaimed land from both its eastern and western coasts. in everyday conversation this process is called “moving mountains in order to fill the ocean (移山填海).” with foreground, floyd and kauffman have respond to this transformation by using bamboo to re-construct a mountain that no longer exists. the contrast between the structure and the ground actualizes the difference between shenzhen’s pre- and post-urban topographies, creating a visible and material history for the area. more importantly, the installation enables bienniale visitors to imagine the lay of shenzhen’s land before urbanization and, in doing so, re-imagine how the city might reproduce itself in the future.

at least i hope so. one of the illusions of land reclamation and disappeared mountains is how quickly they vanish from consciousness. when i go to houhai and look out at the new landscape i have to think, and think hard, to recall something about what was once there. most of the time, however, i end up taking another round of photos and then doing a little side by side comparison. that was then, this is now.

its hard work to keep the city’s past and present simultaneously in mind. usually, i depend on the material world to do that for me. the old buildings, certain parks, particular roads–these hold my memories, which i enter by way of an evening walk. to the extent that it remains in place, shenzhen keeps my memory intact. but the city keeps getting razed. or rebuilt. or refashioned. and as the buildings collapse and new edifices rise, or factories get a facelift and industrial areas are upgraded, i forget. or rather, i loose access to memory. all that stuff are also doors to memory, and when a building gets razed, i am locked out of my past.

click for images of gwen and joshua’s work in progress.

运动会：　field day

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green oasis seventh graders come from the mainland, taiwan, malaysia, and india

so, yesterday was field day at green oasis. i enjoy field day for many reasons, not least of which is that field day makes the students happy, and happy students bring joy. nevertheless, what struck me during field day was the diversity of our student body.

facts that speak to the ongoing globalization of shenzhen. 49% our students come from outside the mainland (including taiwan and hong kong); 25% come from outside greater china (india and korea being the two largest non-chinese populations). for years, people have spoken of shenzhen as a city of immigrants (移民城市). however, what they meant by “immigrant” was “from other parts of the province/country” or simply “outsiders (外地人).” now the immigration situation isn’t so straightforward. most of these students won’t become chinese nationals. however, their parents work here for companies that are clearly here for the long-term. moreover, they have chosen to place their children in a chinese school in order to insure that these children will grow up into bi-cultural (mandarin-speaking) citizens.

this model is obviously different from the local chinese model, which educates with an eye toward helping chinese students become chinese citizens. it is also a very different model from the colonial model of an “international” school, which has taught euro-american or curriculums with an eye toward going to university in the u.s. or europe. those children live in china, but are not part of china; indeed, there is no intention to make them part of china. instead, the green oasis model entails educating international children to be part of china, without becoming chinese nationals. at any rate, we now have students whose mandarin is better than their (native) russian or spanish or korean or cantonese…

in many ways, the green oasis model echoes the larger chinese model of sojourning, where people (outsiders) live in other cities, but retain hometown identities. i’m beginning to think that sojourning increasingly enables chinese people to weave foreigners into the fabric of shenzhen life. so that the questions “where is your hometown (你的老家在哪里？)” and “what country are you from (你是哪个国家的人？)” become functionally equivalent in terms of social mapping. which is to say, that for many chinese, especially students, the u.s. and korea and india are no longer as foreign as they used to be.

field day pictures, which in addition to sharing childhood smiles, also illustrate how childhood has globalized with chinese characteristics…

thoughts on rainy days

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for those not in shenzhen, you are probably blissfully unaware that 4 typhoons have landed nearby over the past several weeks. this means it has rained almost everyday this month. and not little tiny avoidable raindrops, but heavy raindrops that blow horizontally and thus bypass even the largest umbrella. so i haven’t been able to get out and take pictures.

i have, however, been wandering around some of shenzhen’s new hotspots and am struck, once again, by the difference a decade makes. it really is a different era here from ten years ago. yesterday, i saw the latest harry potter in a small, intimate theatre with 40 fat reclining sofas (and mediocre popcorn. the children next to me had the sense to bring kfc.) today, i went to yoga class in wonderful studio with truly wonderful teachers, some who have practiced in india. i then had dinner with a friend and her son at a japonese restaurant. if memory serves, ten years ago i avoided movie theatres because they were often haunted by men who watched with a date chosen from the ladies lined up outside the door. there was no yoga anywhere. and we ate mostly cantonese food; sometimes food from other parts of china, but ten years ago, the cuisine had a definate regional bent.

it’s as if suddenly all the talk about building a global city has come true. the socialist dreamers who came in the 1980s and early 90s have successfully built a city for a middle class that has only recently emerged.
indeed, all the recent cultural activity is no doubt part of this massive yuppification of shenzhen.

or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that those socialist dreamers have built a city for their children, who really do belong to a different world. it is however an open question as to why they belong to a different world. friends who look to japan and korea say it’s possible to be both traditional and modern; china has failed because of socialism. at lunch two days ago, a friend (now in his early 50s) said that people born after 1970 don’t have any tradional characteristics. he blamed the cultural revolution for cutting off contemporary china from its roots. that’s why, he said, china is modernizing like this.

like what? i asked.

without history. shenzhen is the perfect example of new china because it doesn’t have any culture or history. but it’s not even the best copy of the west. china is a fractured (分裂) society. we have no standards to guide us. japan and korea, he continued, have managed to preserve tradition and modernize.

his comments made me re-think the question of master narratives. not the fact that master narratives are imaginary and therefore not real in a material sense. after all, rarely does reality conform to what we think. but rather the fact that without a master narrative it’s hard to make value judgements; why is x better than y? tradition seems to me a legitimate answer to that question. socialism once provided another answer. today, my friend is trying to figure out what happens when all the master narratives have been shown untrue; what can the people believe? how will they recognize the good life? and in what kind of world is shenzhen a desired way of life?

dafen museum

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dafen village museum

went to dafen village the other day. the museum building is finished and staff are now finishing the interior, including choosing pictures and designing galleries. the idea of a dafen museum is itself stunning, especially as the museum is a 5 minute walk from the dafen louvre, one of the largest art malls associated with the village. (unlike the museum, the louvre is located accross the street from actual village borders.) so pictures of what seemed incredibly like a critical performance piece but was in fact business as usual–pictures of workers transporting oil paintings from the yet unopened museum to waiting trucks, the same small, blue trucks that are used throughout shenzhen’s industrial villages…

stem cell therapy in nanshan

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what we don’t know about where we live.

it turns out that nanshan hospital, yes the nanshan hospital where i went for chinese medical treatments in the late nineties, the same nanshan hospital located just up the street from shenzhen university, where i lived and taught for years, is a center of stem cell therapy. indeed, it seems they recruit patiants abroad for treatments that they can’t get in their own country. an articlein businessweek introduces the controversy surrounding the work. or you can check out the shenzhen beike biotechnology website.

i’m sitting here stunned. not by my own ignorance, which increasingly feels like my most loyal companion, nor even by this version of shenzhen’s rush to an international future, which has been the city’s raison d’tre for over 25 years now, nor even, truth be told, by the ways the beike company seems to be exploiting these stories; testimonial advertizing is one of the traditions of my native land. no, i’m simply stunned. i don’t know how to comment on these stories, their existance, they way they circulate, how they are used. i’m grasping for a theory to explain what seems to be happening and the theory isn’t coming, or isn’t there to call up.

perhaps i just don’t know where to draw the ethical line. i don’t know if i’m for or against untested therapy. if for it, i know i’d support universal access, rather than letting the market determine access. if there’s not enough money or stem cells for everyone who needs treatment to get it, does that mean the treatment should be stopped until equal access is possible?

in the meantime, i turn to the comforts of close reading. one of the more fascinating aspects of this whole process is the role of the internet. patients have blogged and blog about their experiences, including pre-treatment conditions, what the treatment is like, and post-treatment improvements/regressions. the stories themselves are moving–from hopelessness to hope, and the courage that moves them. and yet. i’m stunned.

you can find a blogroll of these testimonial blogs at the beike site. i first stumbled upon these blogs through richard’s venture, a new blog. many of the patients use blogspot, which is blocked in the mainland, but if you’re reading this and in the mainland, you know how to get around the firewall. if not, does anyone know of chinese-language sites about beike? or is it a company that is designed to bring foreigners to china, kinda of like the adoption centers in guangzhou? another international practice that leaves me stunned.

mallratting

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are you a coco girl?

lately our eating habits have changed. we’re spending less time in small restaurants and more time in what might be provisionally called high-end chinese chains, which are located in new upscale malls. unlike upscale malls built in the late 90s, which emphasized designer shopping, but american fastfood dining (in diwang, for example, the chains include kfc and tgi fridays and there’ a taco bell in the mix), these new malls seem to have better teashops and restaurants. the food is better, the decor is nicer, and the spaces more relaxed; the emphasis is on pleasurable dining, but pleasure all around. indeed, these new malls offer some of the cleanest and aesthetically pleasing environments in shenzhen. my latest occassional hangout is coco park, or 购物公园 (shopping park), where super cow provides really tasty grilled meats and several japanese resturants tempt me. at the garden city mall (花园城), next to the shekou wallmart, another chain 6,000 restaurant (六千馆) serves a delicious twist on the hotpot. it is located next to a very popular dim sum restaurant, where on weekends families and friends wait as long as an hour for a table.

in jr high and high school, i spent an embarrassing amount of time at the rockaway mall, watching movies and eating junkfood. roughly 25 years later i find myself once again mallratting, but this time it really is for the food.

emplacements

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detail, incense burner, julong village

addresses in chinese read from the largest to the smallest unit. last week, for example, i went to guangdong province, dongguan city, wangniudun township, julong village (广东省东莞市望牛顿镇聚龙村). in terms of the use and organization of the built environment, this administrative hierarchy takes clear form. my trip began at the shenzhen city, luohu bus station, transvessed guangdong’s elaborate (and still expanding) highway network, passed through dongguan city center, and stoped on niuwangdun’s main street, which is narrower and less built up than downtown dongguan, which in turn, is less densely built than is downtown shenzhen, where the journey began. this pattern of narrower streets, shorter buildings, and fewer cars continued with each stage of the journey. from main street, niuwangdun toward julong village, for example, i walked on a main street of four lanes, turned onto a two lane street, stepped onto the one lane street that bordered the julong river, and then turned into a gated alley wide enough to accomodate motorbikes and pedestrians.

in addition to reiterating administrave ranking (provinces administer cities, which administer townships, which administer villages), chinese addresses also tell you whether or not an administrative unit is urban or rural. thus, dongguan (shi) is an urban administrative unit, while wangniudun (zhen) and and julong (cun) are rural levels. in contrast, i live in shenzhen city, futian district, huafu street office, tianmian neighborhood (深圳市福田区华富街道办事处田面居委会). district (qu), street office (jiedao banshichu), and neighborhood (juweihui) are urban designations. not unexpectedly, rural and urban designations also take clear form in the built environment. significantly, rural forms tend to be more traditional and urban forms tend to be more modern or western. thus, for example, the buildings in dongguan city, especially the new city plaza, reflect contemporary architectural trends, while in julong village traditional housing abuts updated one-story homes (平房 literally means flat house and refers to traditional village homes throughout china).

in the prc, rural and urban designations do not simply refer to landuse and population, but also to how the land is used. urban areas are directly under the state, where enterprises, corporations, and individuals can obtain landuse rights (in a process modelled after hong kong’s), but the land ultimately belongs to the state. in contrast, in rural areas, farmers have legal rights to land both for livelihood (growing crops) and housing. there are two main consequences of this situation. first, urban areas have been designated for industrialization, while rural areas have been designated for agricultural production. legally, one can only build a factory in an urban area (although in practice, this has been erroding since deng xiaoping’s southern tour in 1992). second, in terms of property, the traditional, one-stories in the villages are situated on land that belongs to the farmer. in contrast, an urban residents purchase a condo in a highrise, but they do not have eternal rights to it because the land on which the building stands still belongs to the state.

for the past few years, then, dongguan city has been a poster child of sorts for guangdong’s ongoing economic boom. if online statistics are to be believed, from 1999 to 2003, dongguan’s economy grew at a rate of 18.4% a year, enough to make the city the fourth fastest growing in guangdong and 10.3% higher than the national average. now before i went to julong village, i didn’t really think that much about dongguan and when i did it was in terms of boomtown evils: exploitation, prostitution, and pollution. i frequently passed by dongguan on my way to guangzhou and, like supernaut, was both distressed and fascinated by dongguan’s industrial landscape.

now, what’s important about townships like wangniudun is that much of the guangdong boom is actually located in rural townships and villages. administratively, townships are hybrids; they are rural cities. this means that in niuwangdun, julong villagers can invest in industrial production (because it is a city), but that the landuse rights return to villagers, both collectively and individually, because they hold eternal land rights. this loophole has provided guangdong townships and villages with the incentive and flexibility to industrialize in different ways from cities. on the one hand, it has also enabled villagers to become wealthy independent of the state. in shenzhen, this loophole inspired the rural urbanization movement, which changed the administrative status of shenzhen’s farmers from rural to urban, with the result that their children no longer have traditional rights to the land. on the other hand, it has produced a distinctive landscape of tiled multi-story housing, factories, and traditional remnants. for a sense of the emplacements that rural urbanization produces, please visit wangniudun township, julong village.

和平县阳明镇新塘村: field-tripping

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新塘村：new tang village, sunrise

the attitudes of young shenzhers, especially the children of the city’s upper classes, confound their elders, who really don’t know what to do about a generation that hasn’t experienced material poverty. almost thirty years into the shenzhen experiment, a certain material standard of living has become the norm among these children. they expect to have new clothes, pocket money for snacks, and the latest technological gadgets. indeed, if newspaper reports are to be believed, they are a wasteful and lazy group, who take long showers, play online games, and shirk homework responsibilities; in the language of american pop sociology, shenzhen’s young people think they’re entitled not only to what they have, but also to whatever they want.

to counteract their children’s sense of entitlement, wealthy shenzheners tell stories about impoverished childhoods and hungry farmers. these stories are as unsuccessful as those my parents told me: when i was a child, we walked four miles to school; eat all your food because there are starving children in africa. on the one hand, i think these stories fail because children don’t have the experience to imagine beyond their immediate lives. on the other hand, i think these stories fail because children know (even as i knew) that our parents aren’t going to radically restructure their lives to help either starving africans or farmers. instead, these stories aim to change the behavior of children, not to ameliorate social inequality.

nevertheless, adults still try and children still play along. on the 26th and 27th of october, our middle school went on a field trip to greater tang village, yangming township in heping county, in heyuan city (河源市和平县阳明镇大塘村) which is considered an impoverished area (贫困区). according to the heping township officials who hosted us, the official definition of “impoverished” earns less than the national average income but still has enough to eat. usually, families can afford school fees up through middle school, but often have difficulty meeting high school costs, let alone university expenses. according to a people’s daily report the 1,000 odd villagers that make up greater tang village (an administrative territory which is composed of 15 “natural” villages) demonstrate the fact that even if the richest villages are in guangdong province, their are villages that haven’t started getting rich, let alone keep up with the coastal villages. in chinese the expression for these poor cousins is “后无追兵” or “no following soldiers”.

the purpose of the trip was two-fold. our school wanted to give our students a new perspective on the privileges they enjoy as wealthy shenzheners as compared to impoverished students. our yangming middle school hosts wanted their students to be inspired to study even harder to break out of the cycle of poverty. as we discovered during the two-day fieldtrip, many of the yangming students had older brothers and sisters who had dropped out of middle school or not gone to high school in order to begin laboring in places like shenzhen. indeed, a fifteen year-old ninth grader told me she wouldn’t bother taking the high school entrance exam and go right to work after graduation from middle school next june.

the yangming high schools arranged host families for our students and teachers. two of us were assigned to a home, where we ate, slept and were shown the village. yang ming eigth grader, huang shanshan hosted me and my student nicole. shanshan and her family live in new tang village (新塘村), one of the 15 natural villages in the greater tang administrative village nestled between rocky slopes, rice paddies, chicken coops, and family gardens. xin tang village is a hakka (客家) settlement, where paths and shared walls connect the homes to each other, creating a densely populated space. there is a clear spacial division between the village and cultivated areas. indeed, the relative care given to the rice paddies and gardens was striking in comparison to the village proper, where it seemed people took care of inside their homes, but did not care for common areas, which were given over to garbage and scavanging chickens. people seemed to spend a great deal of time outside on paths, working and chatting.

nicole and i shared the only bed in the house; shanshan and her parents slept upstairs on mats. the house was made from local bricks covered by cement, wooden beams supported the ceiling. the first floor consisted of a main room and a kitchen. the main room was divided into two sections, a sleeping section, where the bed was and a social section, with a table, television, and several chairs, some plastic, two made of bamboo. the wash room was a concrete room built next to their pump. for our evening wash, shanshan heated water in the kitchen and then added pump water to adjust the temperature. the outhouse was a separate brick building with a trench dug into the earth. above the trench was a bamboo plank, where i squatted several times a day to relieve myself.

shanshan and her parents moved me with their generousity. they killed a chicken for us and prepared fresh vegetables, eggs, and homegrown rice. when we left, they gave us fresh eggs, homegrown peanuts, and special deep-fried potato cakes for the trip. yangming township gave us a box of kiwi fruits that were locally grown. indeed, their generousity eased the relationship, enabled it to move beyond a tour of poverty. i had feared that the trip would turn the villagers, especially our hosts, into exhibits in living museum and would turn us into tourists. the school had instructed students to give money to their host families as a token of their appreciation, and much thought had been given to what would be the correct amount: not too much so that the families were embarrassed but not so little that they lost materially by hosting us. although the act of hosting didn’t unmake our material inequality, it nevertheless did ameliorate some of the awkwardness of the visit. it certainly reminded me that each of us has something to give and that all of us have a responsibility to accept what is given graciously.

a native of longgang, shenzhen, nicole is also hakka. she enjoyed the trip because it brought back memories of her childhood before her family moved to downtown shenzhen. she grew up in a village like shanshan’s and used to sleep on the same kind of bed. more importangly, she remembered the beauty of the countryside and wondered about why modernization meant the destruction of beautiful places. specifically, as part of shenzhen’s ongoing expansion, her natal village will soon be razed and an upscale housing development built in its place. also, nicole said that she only understood about 70% of what shanshan and her parents said and preferred to speak with them in mandarin, reminding me again of how many variants of local languages (方言) there actually are. after all, heyuan is only a 3 hour drive away from shenzhen.

the belief that youth can be motivated by direct experience inspires this project. more specifically, adults in both places expressed that more communication (交流) between students from both areas would be beneficial. on the one hand, shenzhen youth might learn humility and social responsibility, while yangming youth might learn their are higher goals than working in a factory or restaurant. consequently, our schools hope to establish a hand-in-hand (手拉手) relationship with the yangming first and second middle schools, enabling students and teachers to visit each other.

i hope that this kind of experience might accomplish what exhortations rarely do–inspire us adults to help our children change the world. i know that this experience manifests one, more traditional (in the socialist sense of the word) meaning of the shenzhen experiment, which not only aimed to open china to the world, but also to improve the material wellbeing of all chinese people. in fact, at 63 our school principal is a child of the revolution and she still approaches education with an eye to socialist goals. as a friend of mine said, if china can improve the living standard of all chinese people, bringing stability to its internal affairs, it will have contributed to world peace. one could say the same for the united states and that we start one friendship at a time. i have posted some fieldtrip memories in my galleries.