Tag Archives: history

inscribed history, briefly: shennan road

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Shennan Road is the oldest east-west artery in Shenzhen, until a few years ago when the opening of the northern loop and the Binhai road, it was both Main Street (in the sense of the center of town activities) and the main artery for transporting goods and people from one side of the city to the other. Today, most trucks travel from factories along the northern loop, crossing the border at either Wenjindu or Huanggang, and most cars and all express buses travel along Binhai. However, Shennan Road has maintained its symbolic and functional importance in the organization of the city.

This weekend, I went for a walk along the strip of Shennan Road between the old city hall and the recently opened new city hall. There’s much to be said about the difference between the two buildings, but the point I want to emphasize here is the inscription of history through architecture that is visible along this strip. It is, in many respects a history that can be understood through the movement from the low, concrete municipal building (a Stalinist concrete block), representing the idea of Shenzhen as a manufacturing center to the post-modern glass and steel of the new municipal building, which points to Shenzhen’s aspirations in global finance and management. All this to say, throughout the strip one encounters concrete factory buildings and modernist office buildings that abut newer, taller, and more expensive buildings.

This twenty-five year history is also the history of replacing the collectivist economy with a market economy. This history, while less visible than the progression from manufacturing to finance manifest in the city halls, is nevertheless a structuring feature of this bit of land. This structuring has several levels.

• First, twenty-five years ago, when Shenzhen planners first approached the project of opening the west, they only marked the land from Luohu train station to the Shanghai Hotel. That is to say, for many years when Shenzhen residents said they were going into town, they meant the area between the train station and the Shanghai hotel. This means that the new city center has been moved from the original downtown to what was previously a leechee orchard outside the scope of the original urban plan. Traces of this other history remain in Shenzhen’s center park, which stretches alongside the new city center, large tracks of which are still used to cultivate leechees.

• Second, the transfer of commune land to urban work units predicated this transformation. The Ministry of Aviation developed the area on which the Shanghai hotel was built. The Ministry of Aviation annexed this land from the Shangbu Commune, which is memorialized across the street from the Shanghai hotel in the form of the Shangbu Building, a concrete skyscraper from the mid-1980s.

• Third, this transformation entailed economic re-orientation. The production of electronics for foreign markets financed the construction of the Saige building, which towers over the Huaqiangbei area. Throughout this area, entrepreneurs continue to sell electronic products, which are no longer primarily manufactured in this area. Instead, this area has become a center of leasure and high-end consumption, symbolized by the Zhongxin Plaza, built across the street from the old city hall.

A brief reading of the landscape that unmakes the often heard phrase “Shenzhen has no history”. It also reminds me that simply driving from one end of town to the other involves the reiteration of history through spatial landmarks. What gets confusing in Shenzhen is the speed at which buildings come and go, thereby making us think everything is always new, enabling us to forget what was previously here. It is also a history that connects with the history of landscaping that I talked about in a previous entry. What seems to boggle the mind is the speed, and yet the history is there. How is it we become trained only to see what is new? And how is it that historic difference seems not to matter (in all senses of the word)? What seems important is the ongoing replacement of one set of buildings and environments and lifestyles with another set: I am reminded of how the American West was, in a manner of speaking, won and how then what remained were ghost towns and abandoned mines, farmers with rundown farms.

(I remember when the Shanghai hotel was given new façade over 10 years ago. During the mid 1990s, there was a time when old concrete buildings were dressed up to look like postmodern architecture, but that then gave way to simply razing large areas of land and building newer, taller, and certainly shinier buildings.)

For an incomplete view of this strip of Shennan Road, please visit: http://pics.livejournal.com/maryannodonnell/gallery/0000k20k

on greenspace

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Yesterday, I took my camera for a walk. Although I had a new object to photograph—a well-used pot for brewing Chinese medicine—I didn’t want to carry it. Instead, I walked around the Baihua area, which is bordered by Huaqiangbei in the south and the Shenzhen Stadium in the north. East and West, I meandered between Baihua Road numbers 4 and 2, respectively. This is primarily a residential area, with housing from the late 1980s and early 1990s. The Shenzhen School of the Arts is located here, as is a Wallmart.

Greenspace constitutes one of the pleasures of older developments. Unlike newer developments, which have enclosed park-like areas for their exclusive residents, older areas sometimes have large strips of greenspace that stretch between the development wall and the sidewalk. Lovely banyan trees and lush bamboo clumps shade passage through these strips, which were planned when land was plentiful and funding for elaborate and imported topiary not easily had. Then, planners planted native species and left them to their own devices. Today, grass and palm trees, cultivated flowerbeds and exotic bushes define both public and privatized greenspaces.

One might measure the historical distance between new and old greenspaces in terms of an all-too-visceral ethics of efficiency. As factories, developments, and streets have colonized most of Shenzhen’s land, the older greenspaces, with their cool shade, unkempt paths, and rustling leaves seem vaguely decadent, indeed wasteful. In contrast, the newer greenspaces fit within the lines of an efficient urban planning. They boast denser vegetation and more varieties of plants per square meter, as well as park benches, concrete paths, and small pavillions.

The relative decadence of the older greenspaces is a strange phenomenon. It’s clearly not a question of ecological efficiency. The older greenspaces require no care, except for the occasional sweeping of leaves and picking up trash that accumulates in the network of banyan tree roots. The new greenspaces demand constant attention. Accordingly, teams of gardeners cultivate them from about 6 a.m. until 5 a.m. (with a lunch break and nap time). The decadence of the older greenspaces isn’t even a question of occupied space; the legislated proportion of greenspace to built space hasn’t changed over the past two decades. Instead, I think this relative decadence might arise from the plants themselves, or rather, the growing.

Plants thrive in semi-tropical Shenzhen. Grasses and vines quickly overtake any bit of untended land, climbing walls and bridges, weaving themselves into mesh wire fences. The vitality of Shenzhen’s weeds is particularly evident at abandoned-soon-to-be-razed sites, which support thick walls of shimmering vines and purple flowers. Hence, the city must hire so many gardeners in the newer greenspaces, which like botanical gardens have precise borders between different species; no room for creeping vines, even less for natives. In the older spaces, however, the banyan trees’ roots hold back the onslaught of vines, which cling to the development walls, their lush often translucent green setting off the mottled brown roots. Patterned, yes, but not clipped back, and therein, I think, is the difference that makes a difference.

The sharp lines of the newer greenspaces materialize an efficiency made possible by shearing back growth. I can imagine the gardeners’ irritation at their charges yearning to grow outside the plan. One comes, in the newer greenspaces, to know one’s place and how to occupy it. In contrast, the decadence of the older greenspaces feels like a deep, satisfying stretch, creating one’s place through the process of occupation. This might be one definition of freedom—having the space to grow according to one’s nature, even as we respect the conditions that allow others to flourish, co-evolving. That said, the efficiency with which vines overtake an abandoned factory or deserted village reminds us that others will thrive on our graves; we too are an environment.

A post-script. After I began writing this entry, I took a walk in the northern section of the city’s Central Park. This is older greenspace, older even then the so-called “older greenspaces” described above. Those spaces came into being with the city, 20-odd years ago. Instead, the land on which Central Park was zoned was formerly a leechee orchard. In the northern section, far off the main strip, the park remains a leechee orchard. Indeed, the city still harvests leechees here every June and July. Here, the clipping and weeding and cultivation feel like homecoming. Native, if you will. At any rate, I was reminded that there are gardens and there are gardens. Simply outgrowing the plan isn’t necessarily the point either, it’s just a tickle, a whisper: there are other ecologies possible.

To view some of Shenzhen’s greenspace—old and new, inadvertent and leftover from socialist agriculture—please visit: http://pics.livejournal.com/maryannodonnell/gallery/0000aw3w. I have also photographed the found objects in central park. Those pictures are at: http://pics.livejournal.com/maryannodonnell/gallery/000093f8.

The Buji Crossing

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A few days ago, I went to the Buji crossing, one of seven border crossings internal to the Shenzhen municipality. This border is called the 2nd line (二线), and divides Shenzhen into the Special Economic Zone (SEZ) and Baoan and Longgang Districts. Buji is one of Shenzhen’s major manufacturing areas. It is also a center of migrant laborers, who either work in Buji, or enter the SEZ at Buji. So it is an area filled with semis and buses, as goods and people are hauled from one place to another.

Buji is one of those places where I viscerally feel the contradiction between vague research commitments to, if not the truth, then at least some version of the whole story and my bodily aesthetics. Here, goods and people clog the area, pressing into my skin and I inhale carbon monoxide and sweat. I walk quickly past numerous terminals where thin, sun-darkened men load and unload semis, while rural migrants get off long-distance buses carrying bulging plastic bags and dragging wheeled suitcases. Some stare back at me and my camera remains dormant; I am embarrassed to be seen observing what many would rather hide, or failing that, disavow. Along these streets, women hawk fruit, prepared foods, and bottled drinks. Venders and homeless migrants have variously occupied the areas under pedestrian overpasses; these spaces stink of rotting foods and urine and I find myself wondering if there are any public bathrooms nearby. Is it possible to bathe or defecate in private? I notice children working beside adults and am reminded that many of my students are in summer school, already preparing for next semester’s tests. I have come to take photos, but find it difficult to stop and pose my objects because I want to be already beyond the crowded heat and stench. Instead, I snap a photo here and there, refusing to meet anyone’s gaze, moving determinedly forward. I am reduced from methodological exposition to shamed confession. Such are the lessons of the Buji crossing. Continue reading →

huanggang road: economies of scale

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This afternoon I walked along Huanggang Road, which runs along a north-south axis, from the Hong Kong border (at Huanggang) to Shenzhen’s North Loop road. The North Loop connects up with Buji (one of Shenzhen’s manufacturing centers, located just beyond the SEZ’s border in Longgang District) and then on to Guangzhou by way of Dongguan. Although less well known than Shenzhen and Guangzhou, Dongguan is a major manufacturing center.

The point is that everyday, hundreds of semis pass back and forth along Huanggang Road, hauling containers full of goods from Shenzhen, Dongguan, and Guangzhou and then returning from Hong Kong for another load. I’m told that with turn around time at the border, its possible for drivers to make two trips a day. These containers are then loaded on to ships in Hong Kong and shipped throughout the world. (Just last week, I led a group of Shenzhen students on a study trip to England, where they amused themselves looking for souvenirs “made in China”.)

The drivers are licensed in both Hong Kong and Shenzhen, although the trucks are designed to drive on the left side of the road, British style. They rumble past housing developments from about 6 a.m. to midnight. At rush hour, they make Shenzhen’s already clogged streets even more impassible, squeezing traffic into the safety lanes and causing more impatient drivers into mid-stream k-turns to get off Huanggang Road. Bikers continue to weave fearlessly through the mess.

I have had difficulty representing these semis because they stretch beyond my line of sight, precluding a total image. Yet up close, they seem formless, sheets of metal that are themselves the reason the horizon stops just off the sidewalk. When not forming an inadvertent convoy, they growl past pedestrians, shaking the earth and burping up carbon monoxide. Commuters, waiting at Huanggang bus stops, cover their noses and mouths with their sleeves or handkerchiefs; some wear surgical masks, which they remove once on the bus.

It is at this level, that “global flows of production” have become tangible to me. I have been to the ports, where containers pile one on top of another, and have read reports about so much tonnage a year passing from China to the world by way of Hong Kong, but those figures remain too abstract. Crossing the street, inhaling carbon monoxide for several blocks, listening to the engines rev—these have made visceral the feel of mass production, the ways in which manufacturing, importing, and exporting goods are not simply a matter of economy, but also choices about the kind of world in which we want to live. The containers moving along Huanggang Road constitute my backyard.

These images of claypot on Huanggang Road remain awkward, out of balance, and I think its because my claypot and even three semis do not belong to the same representational scale. Reason enough to re-consider the world being made in China; my life plays out at claypot scale (in a manner of speaking) and yet I am trying to imagine, understand, and evaluate a world in which thousands of containers, semis, and ships pass by daily. If I can’t make this imaginative leap from where I am, what can I know about this world? More to the point, to what extent does the irritating lack of balance in these images actualize more than a cognitive inability to grasp where I am, but rather the impossibility of making semis part of a human world?

haunting images–houhai land reclamation

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I’m having difficulty thinking about these images. I took them about two and half years ago with my first digital camera, which wasn’t a high resolution instrument and for some reason the fuzziness of these pictures bothers me. I look at them and see “unreliable camera” rather than “artsy interpretation”, but that perhaps is part of the point of this post (that and the dangers of alliteration.) The challenge of documenting Shenzhen has been not simply that the place in question constantly changes or even that that how I see Shenzhen has also changed, but the moral, political, and aesthetic evaluations that I make about these changes have also been twisting themselves into new and often unrecognizable forms. One of the more immediate consequences of all this change (or at least my most pressing concern du jour) is that it’s often difficult to squeeze those past images into today’s project, which (if I’m honest) is more often than not what happened when I was distracted from what I thought I was doing in the earlier photographs.

To contextualize subsequent musings about images of land reclamation in Shenzhen, it might be useful to check out two other sites. First, the scale of these changes can be grasped by watching the time-series satellite images of environmental transformation in the Pearl River Delta. As the image zooms from a picture of the world toward Shenzhen, you will note that the municipality is located in the southeast of China, just north of Hong Kong. (Future posts will include much about the various border crossings and ideas about connections, contacts, and enforced exclusions, for the moment, however, I’m sticking to the point of land reclamation. Although, I do wonder about the point of a post in which most of the information has been placed in parantheses…) Second, you can look at a more detailed map of Shenzhen. (This map is in Chinese. I haven’t yet found a decent English map of Shenzhen on-line. If you, gentle reader happen to know of one, please let me know. Also at this site, you can view a version of the 1996-2010 Shenzhen Urban Plan.) There are six districts in Shenzhen: (from east to west at the Hong Kong border) Yantian, Luohu, Futian, Nanshan and (from east to west just north of these districts) Longgang and Baoan. The Nantou Penisula juts out into the Pearl River in the western region of the city (Nanshan District), just south of the airport (there should be an icon). If you zoom in, you will see the area that has been designated for reclamation. The western passageway linking Shenzhen to Hong Kong is also noted on this map (it should be finished sometime next year).

Now the question that haunts me is “other than measuring change, (which the folks at NASA seem to be doing quite well), what’s the point of these images?” Is change in and of itself what’s interesting? Or is the point the goals we think we’re pursuing through efforts to direct (inevitable) change? What does it mean to witness transformation? In these earlier pictures, I was interested in the scale of change, the kinds of inequality that I saw as coming into being with the new landscape, the leveling of the coastline, and the incongruous placement of a desert, where there had once been oyster and big-head fish farms. I’m still interested in these issues, but they are now differently encoded in the landscape. It is more difficult to find traces of massive land reclamation because most of that work is done. Those who visit Houhai today encounter real estate developers, newly laid roads, and Mangrove Park, a lovely coastline park, while the squatters that once occupied the land created out of buried fish farms have been pushed elsewhere. What’s more, much of the undeveloped land has been either cordoned off into construction sites or hidden behind imported topiary.

Perhaps I’m trying to say that these images capture something that no longer exists today. These displacements–of people and fish and water and earth–constitute an invisible history. Yet this invisibility is different from the invisibility of bikes and bikers, where I had learned to see them but not register their presence in my world. Here, the invisibility of those other landscapes has to do with absences, deliberately created or not. Buried fish, unlike harried water deliverymen, will not crash into my consciousness as I walk to school. The previous coastline is gone. I pose a teapot on a bench at the new border, which from a distance, looks almost like the old border, which is itself a measure of the relative economic states of Shenzhen and Hong Kong. (In a nutshell, Shenzhen’s booming and Hong Kong has settled into slow growth.) A story of death, in other words. Or perhaps, more acurately a ghost story. Shenzhen haunts me. And that’s the rub. As an anthropologist, I have been trained to write dissertations, not ghost stories. I look at traces of past encounters with Shenzhen, these pictures or hastily scribbled fieldnotes in deteriorating notebooks, and have difficulty thinking about them. But thinking may be the problem. Watching Houhai, I have learned both the unreliability of documentation and the sadness of witnessing what still feels like needless destruction. Is this sensibility itself the ethnographic object?

A friend and poet, Steven Schroeder has taught me much about the intellectual rigor of story-telling. His poem, “Fish” written after a walk on reclaimed Houhai, poignantly evokes these ghosts and their fragile existence. Thank you.

Fish

dying, gasp
at the bottom of the air
for water.

City, rising
on dry bones, gasps
at the bottom
of heaven
for air.

For more of Steve’s poetry, please visit his site.