Tag Archives: history

Shekou Tempest Updates

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Twenty years after the Shekou Tempest, reporters interviewed the two protagonists, Li Yanjie (李燕杰) and Zeng Xianbin (曾宪斌). In retrospect, it seems clear that the two were already walking different roads, which headed to two different versions of contemporary Chinese society, one neo-traditional and the other neo-liberal, both with a nationalist twist.

Li Yanjie continued and deepened his neo-traditional ethical teaching and, over the past ten years has re-emerged as a cultural critic. On his blog, he occassionaly contemplates the meaning of life in highly poetic prose that receives enthusiastic accolades from his readers.

For young people, love is a sweet word. From ancient times to the present, how many people have added to its beautiful colors and poetic imaginary! In those beautifully moving romantic poems, we can frequently feel the noble and healthy way that our Chinese people love.爱情，对于青年人来说，是一个甜蜜的字眼。古往今来，曾有多少人赋予她以美的色彩、诗的意境啊！在那些优美感人的爱情诗歌里，我们常常可以感受到我们中华民族高尚、健康的爱情格调。

Ormosia blooms in the south, but who knows how many branches this year?

Please pick several, as ormosia most symbolizes love.

红豆生南国，春来发几枝，愿君多采撷，此物最相思。

After a few more examples of romantic poetry, Li Yan Jie continues:

But how many young people today don’t know anything about this. After watching a few foreign films, they intentionally imitate those scenes of embracing and kissing, and some even are like this in public during broad daylight. 可是，现在有些青年人却不知道。看了几部外国故事片，就专门模仿那些拥抱、接吻的镜头，有的人大白天在公共场所也这样。

And then he concludes:

To maintain the purity of love, we need lofty ideals of love and to  pay attention to romantic civilization. 爱情的格调要高，还得注意恋爱文明，要保持爱情的纯洁性。

Complete post, here.

Zeng Xianbin’s neo-liberal ethics blossomed into a career as a real estate development planner and professor at the Qinghua University Professional Management Training Center ( 清华大学职业经理人培训中心).  I have been unable to find a blog under his name, but that may be because he sells video-cds of his lectures, and they aren’t cheap.

What is interesting is that Zeng Xianbin transformed his career as a journalist into that of a lecturer, much like Li Yanjie. And, like Li Yanjie, Zeng Xianbin has focused on living in the new era. However, unlike Li Yanjie, Zeng Xianbin has understood each of these changes to be an opportunity and pursued them as such. Indeed, his first opportunity was his comments on and understanding of how Shenzhen reformed public housing by gradually eliminating subsidized housing in favor of a housing market. He now provides ideas for how to use the market to provide suitable housing for low and middle income families.

Even more interestingly is that both men have shifted their ethical focus away from society and placed it firmly on the individual. Ethics has become self-expression, which may be more properly be understood as a kind of self-control (自治能力), whether in the pursuit of love or  money. Which returns me to much earlier thoughts on Confucian businessmen or 儒商。

the shekou storm – translation

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Throughout the 1980s, Beijing and Shenzhen were symbols in and locations of debates about the development of post-Mao society. In many ways, Beijing symbolized and produced theories of reform and opening, while Shenzhen symbolized and actualized these theories. However, as the saying goes, plans can’t keep up with change. Roughly a year and a half before the demonstrations in Tian’anmen, the Shekou Tempest demonstrated that the government was serious in its intention to reform and open all of society, including politics as usual.

In tribute to the efforts of young people in both cities, and the sincerity of the questioning, I have translated “Questions and Answers about the Shekou Tempest (蛇口风波问答录) by Zeng Xianbin (曾宪斌) because the article reminds us how important Shenzhen was (Shekou especially) to the hopes and dreams that characterized Chinese youth during the 1980s. The article also illustrates at what cost Shenzhen’s post Southern Tour (1992) development has come; once upon a time, Shenzhen residents had the rhetorical skills and ethical compulsion to debate the social implications of going capitalist.

Ironically, many of the early Shekou gold diggers, who once believed it was possible to make money and contribute to society, now sould like old leftists – too many people have come to Shenzhen only to make money without contributing anything to society. This emphasis on working for society, rather than oneself seems to be the important thread that links Old Shenzhen to the Chinese Revolution; New Shenzhen, post 1989 Shenzhen, is something else again.

Questions and Answers about the Shekou Tempest

by Zeng Xianbin

Reporter’s note: This is a small debate that took place half a year ago and was later reported in several newspapers. Today this newspaper [People’s Daily] introduces the event and some related opinions, as well as providing space for more comerades to participate in the discussion, together exploring the question of youth political thought work.

On January 13 this year [1988], Shekou, Shenzhen organized a “Youth Education Experts and Shekou Youth Symposium”. Participants included Comerades Li Yanjie, Qu Xiao, and Peng Qiyi, three political lecturers from the Chinese Youth Thought Work Research Center and seventy Shekou youths. The media has already introduced this symposium. Even if evaluations of this discussion were mixed, nevertheless there was concensus about one point: its meaning exceeded the actual tempest itself. During the first and middle parts of July, this reporter split his time between Beijing and Shenzhen, interviewing people involved such as Li Yanjie, Qu Xiao, Peng Qingyi and Yuan Geng, asking them to answer questions about which readers are concerned. In order to insure that the reader gets objective, verifiable facts, this reporter has recorded only the questions and answers. The reader must judge the rights and wrongs of the case for herself. Continue reading →

what’s in a name? uncanny histories…

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Today, I had multiple journeys with cabbies, whose names uncannily re-inscribe a history of social movements as labor migration.

The first cabbie was named Weibin (卫宾). He was born in 1971 to parents who supported Mao’s Cultural Revolution. At 18, Weibin joined the army and was redeployed to Beijing in April, 1989, where he and other trainees were on as back-up. According to Weibin, PLA soldiers didn’t respond to any civilian actions until they received orders. Weibin said it is a cruel tragedy whenever compatriots (同胞 literally “from the same womb”) fight.

The second cabbie was named Xiaoping (小平), who denied any connection to historic figures. Xiaoping first came to Shenzehn in 1993, a year after his non-namesake’s visit jumpstarted the post-Tian’anmen Chinese boom.  Cabbie Xiaoping left Shenzhen after 6 months to work with hometown friends in Xiamen. He returned to Shenzhen two years ago, but can’t find any of his earlier haunts; it is not the same city.

June 7 update: John Ford discusses the relationship between labor and 1989 more concretely, here, reminding us that the past twenty years have been about keeping labor in its place, even when people move around.

In a related post, Lyn Jeffrey neatly summerizes the different challenges that unemployed students and workers/migrants (might) pose to the government.

(Yes, in an internet world, I now read newspapers and blogs  like I watch television – I show up at a site (or a series), browse around, and follow interesting links, rather than reading today’s newspaper or watching a show on the day it was broadcast/rerun…)

玉历宝钞：return of the repressed, reworked for the current age

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old museum entrance

Originally uploaded by maryannodonnell

Recently I have noticed that buddhist iconography is seeping into local shrines, which have been growing stronger this past decade. At the Daxin Tianhou Temple, for example, Guanyin (boddhisattva of compassion, but also the Goddess of conception) and 天花娘娘 (Tiānhuā niángniáng the Goddess of pox -cow, small, and vaccines thereof, who also heals disease in general and is somehow related to conception) have joined Tianhou on the alter. Also, popoular Buddhist texts and sutras are being distributed in local shrines and temples. In fact, the Shenzhen Hongfa Temple in Fairy Park is actively publishing and presumably delivering these tracts. Other sutras are published by very local printers, whose addresses include place markers such as “side alley”. Continue reading →

of memories and the public sphere

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This is a longer version of a response to Elliong Ng’s post on Sensitive Anniversary, Edited Memories, which takes up the Peking Duck’s lament:

I find it heartbreaking that here, in what 20 years ago was the vortex where it all took place, there remains in the minds of the young no image of the men and women who died in the crackdown, no stories of the bravery or even of the daily turn of events, the “Goddess of Democracy,” the sort-of hunger strikes, the meeting of Wu’er Kaixi wearing his pajamas with Li Peng, etc. Instead, it’s basically a void, interrupted with a few government talking points and state-issued photos, like those of pre-”Liberation” Tibetan serfs with their limbs hacked off by evil landowners. And I say, What can I do? And I answer, Write it down, and do your tiny, microscopic bit to keep the memory alive.

I think the question of what older people want the next generation to know and how we want them to know are interesting questions because there are important differences between establishing and nourishing a vital public sphere and sharing memories with our children and their friends. Most of us reminice with people our own age, rather than with those of us younger than ourselves. In contrast, we rely on social institutions to teach some version of history – schools, the news media, paperback novels, and hope that our children and their friends will come to some understanding of events. Continue reading →

Temporal Dislocations

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I have spent most of the past fifteen years of my life thinking about the creation of space in Shenzhen. However, the trip to Switzerland provoked me into thinking about time – the other half of that ever useful phrase “chronotope”.

Before I left for Switzerland, I sat in front of my computer and imagined what might connect Switzerland and Shenzhen and came up with rather banal pseudo-statistics like: (1) Switzerland has a population of 7 million, and Shenzhen has a guestimated population of 14 million, that means we can stuff two Switzerlands into one Shenzhen; (2) Switzerland is as large as the Pearl River Delta Economic Zone, which means (a) those 7 million people have a lot more room than we do in Shenzhen and (b) there are about 70 million living in the PRD, so we could stuff 10 Switzerlands into the Delta; (3) there are lots of fake Rolexes for sale in Shenzhen, possibly even more than there are real Rolexes for sale in Switzerland.

“Temporal Dislocations”, a two panel image-poem was the temporal unfolding of my thinking, travel, and reflection on Switzerland and Shenzhen. First, I made the panels: Swiss Times, which used maps of Switzerland and Rolex watches to map Shenzhen and note key historical moments in the creation of the SEZ’s chronology and Shenzhen Speed, which departed from Marx’s insight that in capitalist societies “all that is solid melts into air” in order to express the experience of capital accumulation in Shenzhen. Next, in Switzerland, writers and other food-scape participants, wrote various comments about time in general and/or our times together on the scrolls. Finally, back in Shenzhen, I made frames out of snapshots from the trip and the events that led up to the Swiss visit. So chronologically, one frame begins where the other ends.

However, as I have marinated in the idea of time, I have realized that there are at least three ways that the social production, use, and valuation of time in Switzerland and Shenzhen might be interestingly compared. So, a bit of anthropological musing, which might be understood as theorization without a literature review (and any real in depth fieldwork in Switzerland):

(1) Time as an expression of personal character. I’ve already speculated on the whole “以人为本” sense of time. Here, I’ll just mention another example of the personalized vs externalized experience of time in the public expression of “ability” versus something like “respect” (yes, I need a better word, please suggest). In Shenzhen, there is constant talk about “firsts” – the first person to do something, the first person to earn something, the first person to achieve something… that first sets the parameters for everything that follows. This means what is important is pride of place, rather than the actual means needed to grab it. However, In Switzerland, I had the impression that respect for the externalization of time through amazingly efficient clocks seemed to make punctuality function within discourses about respect and equality, so that vying for first place, especially elbowing one’s place to the front of the line, would definately come off as nouveau riche. So in Shenzhen, being first means one has “ability”, where it seemed that in Switzerland, being punctual meant one was “respectful of others”.

(2) Time as a way of making a living. The time as a way of making a living envolves different relations to the measurement of time. In Switzerland, people make watches, so they are actually involved in the mechanicalization of time. Click. Click. Click. Whereas in Shenzhen, the city has flourished because of high-speed mass production, which is in fact our competative advantage. The factories and assembly lines, the construction sites, all run 24-7, unless there’s some kind of electrical rationing going on or a recession in the United States.

(3) How history is materialized. In Switzerland, much social value was created by saving wonderful examples from the past. They invested much in preservation so that what came out of history were unique buildings and objects that could not be replaced. In contrast, Shenzhen focuses on being in front of developments, what is actually pursued is the future, which appears as blueprints and models. Once built, there is a sense in which the value is less than the next, great project.

(4) What needs to be theorized is the way in which it all connects through international finance. “Interest” is, of course, a product of rules about making money simply because life unfolds. (And once upon a Catholic time, wasn’t usury a sin?) All those Swiss banks. I don’t know how they’re connected to Shenzhen. I do know Switzerland was the first country to sign a bi-lateral trade agreement with the PRC (Feb this year). I suspect there’s lots of Chinese money in Swiss bank accounts. I know that many Chinese students attend Swiss schools, especially those that grant degrees in hospitality.

(5 – just because numbers make it all seem logical) What’s also interesting to me is that different kinds of city’s grow out of these different value systems. So, Switzerland has cities that are dedicated to the production of watches, and cities that are beautifully preserved tributes to past worlds – Romainmotier and St. Gall, for example. Likewise, the different areas in Shenzhen are defined by manufacturing and the next area to be developed – Gangxia and huge tracts of Houhai, for example.

Anyway, Temporal Dislocations may be viewed here.

al fresco and imported greens

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al fresco

Originally uploaded by maryannodonnell

last night, we returned to a very old haunt–the nanyou food street, which used to be a thriving world of al fresco seafood, sichuan hot pot, and the odd miao restaurants. today, the street still bustles, but in a crumbling, obviously down-graded kind of way. it’s interesting to note that chains have moved in where independent restaurants used to be, while several spaces have been consolidated into larger restaurants, and rennovations were under way for another mega-restaurant.

for years, shenzhen has been actively upgrading its image by removing al fresco restaurants and other small, independent stores that used to spill onto the uneven sidewalks. all this grooming has resulted in neat, straight, clean streets that cut through beautifully tend and imported topiary–we are overwelmed by palm trees, where the restaurants and stores and kiosks used to be. the restaurants, of course, have (been) moved indoors, where air-conditioning, private rooms, and stylish chairs allow people to not only dine in comfort, but also eat in environments where open-toed high heals and business suits can be kept clean. after all, one of the downsides to al fresco dining is the grime that accumulates under the grill, between the tables, and in street gutters.

so, clear stratification under way in terms of unique dining experiences for those with money and increasingly mass produced for those with less. indeed, it is noticible that the al fresco restaurants continue to thrive in working class and older neighborhoods, while in more middle class neighborhoods (and those that have been subjected to beautification projects), the restaurants are all tucked away behind glass doors. unfortunately, for small restaurants, this layout is not comfortable. given the noise and proximity of fellow dinners in a successful chinese restaurant, big is better if you don’t have the sidewalk. thus, more fallout from the street-cleaning: larger, high capital restaurants do better in middle-class areas because they can provide a better dinning environment, while opportunities for low capital food entrepreneurs diminish.

yes, i am waxing nostalgic for old shenzhen, the shenzhen that friends once derided as “nothing more than a small town,” the shenzhen where al fresco dining was the norm, where workers and employees both jostled for tables under magnolia trees along uneven streets, and where cargo trucks rushed past, spewing carbon monoxide into our drinks.

Who should have rights to the City?

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Questions of civic identity haunt Shenzhen like the tag lines of a never-ending soap opera: When will people who live in Shenzhen feel that the city is their hometown (老家)? Is it possible to feel like a Shenzhener without a Shenzhen hukou? When will residents with Shenzhen hukou (户口) say, “I’m a Shenzhener (full stop)” and not, “I’m a Shanghai person (uncertain fade out)”? Will residents who claim Shenzhen identity ever admit that they are from Guangdong and not transplants in a non-Cantonese city? And if Shenzhen gives long-term residents with hukou in another city a residence permit that includes all hukou rights will this administrative restructuring generate a corresponding rise in civic identity?

30 years ago, most Chinese had hukou in the place where they were born and raised. Consequently, their administrative status reiterated their emotional identification with their hometowns. A Beijiner both held a Beijing hukou and self-identified as someone from Beijing.

Today, uncounted millions of Chinese people have migrated from their hometowns to live and work elsewhere, unmaking the easy correspondence between one’s hukou and one’s hometown that had defined Maoist society.This situation is particularly acute in Shenzhen, where the majority of residents are classified as 非深圳户籍的深圳人 (Shenzheners without Shenzhen hukou). Statistics from 2005 put Shenzhen’s population at 5.97 million of which 1.65 million had Shenzhen hukou and over 4 million had temporary residences (暫住证). In addition, the City identified over 4 million temporary residents who had lived in Shenzhen for under a year, bringing the actual population to roughly 10 million.

Here’s the rub: the traditional correspondence between hukou and hometown has had concrete effects on efforts to create post-hukou civic identities. In many cities, for example, those who are “really (have both hukou and hometown status)” from the city blame those who aren’t for urban problems. This logic hinges on the assumption that “real” residents care about the quality of life in a city, while “sojourners” don’t. In addition, under the current hukou system, a Chinese citizen only has rights to city  welfare (including public education for child) in the city or town of their hukou residency, rather than in where they live.

The question of whether or not rights to the city should be based on hukou status is more pressing in Shenzhen than in any other Chinese city because most residents aren’t from here. Moreover, the City’s growth and success is attributed not to residents, but to immigrants. In other words, Shenzheners without Shenzhen hukou are the majority of Shenzhen residents.

In August 2008, Shenzhen promulgated the Shenzhen Residency Permit Temporary Application Process (深圳市居住证暂行办法), a reform of the hukou system, allowing anyone age 16 or over, who has lived in the city for more than 30 days to apply for a residence permit (居住证) that carries the same rights as a Shenzhen hukou.

The Shenzhen reform is notable for several reasons. First, it makes inhabitation, rather than birthplace the criteria for urban welfare. Second, it is open to all Chinese citizens, regardless of whether or not they hold a rural or urban hukou. Third, it assumes that people immigrate to rather than temporarily sojourn in Shenzhen. Fourth, it implicitly challenges traditional assumptions that hometown identification is natural, instead foregrounding the idea that civic identity is a voluntary practice.

Nevertheless, the larger question of who actually claims Shenzhen as their hometown continues to hinge on the question: does administratively designating a city necessarily produce a community that identifies with those borders? It’s possible that what is being produced in Shenzhen is not hometown identification, but rather a weak hometown identification with strong national ties. In other words, any Chinese person should have rights to Shenzhen regardless of hometown identity, making citizenship the only precondition for claiming rights to urban welfare.

This legislation has me hopeful. Not because I think it will be unproblematically implemented and thereby unmake the inequality that has structured Shenzhen hukou. Nor because a stop-gap status between no hukou and hukou status is enough to unmake the inequality that is the national hukou system. But rather, this legislation has me hopeful because it clearly states that living in Shenzhen entitles one to rights to the city.

Tianmian: East West South North

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About a year ago, I had the privilege of participating in Vexed Urbanism: A Symposium on Design and the Social at The New School. I contributed Tianmian: East West South North an image poem that mapped four of Shenzhen’s formative ideologies along east-west and north-south axes.  In this piece, I aim to show – quite literally – how landscape is never simply place, but also and always a symbolically organized world, a cosmos. Thus, Tianmianillustrates how it is possible to read not only Shenzhen’s history, but also the values that have informed the city’s construction in the lay of the land, the placement of a building, and movements in and out of an urban village.

East West South North

Shekou 30th anniversary

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This year marks the 30th anniversary of the China Merchants (招商局) Shekou Industrial Zone (possibly park). Shekou was established one year before Shenzhen, which celebrates the city’s thirtieth next year or the following year, depending on whether one counts from the year Guangdong approved the decision to establish Shenzhen (1979), or the Central government (1980). The SEZ border with the rest of the country wasn’t fully in place until 1986… Anyway, all sorts of commemorative events have already begun, including randomly posted pictures of Old Shenzhen, here, here and here, which are worth checking out to get a sense of the scale of change.

(Although the first set are actually from the 25th anniversary. I really do have to write about the ongoing and seemingly compulsive revisions of Shenzhen history. In a city that is constantly referred to as having no history, the historic compulsion is not only alive and well, it also shows up in advertising as “11 years of experience” as if 11 years was a long time, and of course, it is, but only in the context of thirty years, which are considered nothing in the history of 5,000 years of civilization… contradictions, contradictions…)

One of the more famous pictures from the early years is of Deng Xiaoping writing the characters for Seaworld (海上世界), here. His daughter stands to his right and, looking over his shoulder is Yuan Geng, the man who initiated many of the reforms that are today considered central to reform and opening, including: the first industrial park open to foreign investment, directly hiring and firing employees (rather than using centralized work assignments), and introducing market driven management principles (time is money, efficiency is life.

This picture is interesting for what it tells us about the political culture in which Shekou came into being as well as the kind of political and social change that Shekou once symbolized.

1. 1984 was the first time that Deng Xiaoping came to Shenzhen. He visited many places, but the two symbolically most important were Guomao (in Luohu, near the train station) and the Minghua cruise ship in Shekou. He inscribed characters for both the Shenzhen and Shekou governments. Shenzhen received the famous lines: 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 (the development and experience of shenzhen proves that the policy to establish an economic special zone was correct, picture of Deng Xiaoping writing inscription.) In contrast, Shekou received four characters: 海上世界 (seaworld).

2. The actual content of the inscriptions points to the differences between the early eighties Shenzhen and Shekou models of reform. Shenzhen was explicitly linked with politics. This is confirmed by the importance of Guomao, which was built as both a shopping center and an office building to house representatives from Chinese provinces, cities, and ministries. In contrast, Shekou was explicitly linked re-orienting everyday life from models of third world mutual support and mass production to capitalist trade and individualized consumption as a brief history of the Minghua and the four characters “Seaworld” shows.

The Minghua was a French cruise ship christened by DeGalle (1962). The Chinese bought it to transport engineering support to Tanzania in 1973 to build railroad in support of villigization—a form of African socialism based on the Chinese model. In 1979, then used as part of relinking Sino-Japanese relations. In 1983, the Minghua was moved to Shekou and refurnished as a floating restaurant and nightclub, where it anchored a westernized club scene.

3. When Deng Xiaoping inscribed the characters for Seaworld, he not only signaled his support of the Shekou model, he made the kinds of reforms that were taking place in Shekou a model for national development. Chinese leaders inscribe (题词) calligraphy to support organizations and policies. As of 1984, reform and opening did not only refer to administrative reorganization (as signaled by the Shenzhen inscription), but also to social and cultural reform. This is important because before 6.4 individual desires and political reform had not yet been brutally separated, so that in pursuing their dreams, young people in Shenzhen also represented a new kind of Chinese future.

4. The fascinating and ongoing politics of the smiling face. Smiling continues to be, like inscribing phrases and words, a way that Chinese leaders publicly express political support. This picture of happy leaders was a metonym for reform society: following this path will lead to a happy future. It ties into traditional paternalism, in which strict fathers only smiled when their children truly did something well.