Tag Archives: luohu

morning walk 6 july: 鹿丹村

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ludan village wall

Pleasantly chilled inside Shenzhen’s upscale malls and glass towers, one forgets that outside mold relentlessly creeps across older surfaces, unmaking walls that once upon a time boasted distinct edges and sharp, modernist lines. Mold flourishes in Shenzhen. There was a time, an earlier, less refined time, when Shenzhen pioneers built in concrete, as if they were still living in northern climes, where winter snows deter topiary from swelling to monstrous sizes and arid lands hold in check uncontrolled growth. In visible contrast, glazed tiles valiantly slow fungal expansion on the high risen walls of post-millennial Shenzhen’s inner city villages and well-serviced business apartments. Indeed, so pernicious are southern spores that less than thirty years after Deng Xiaoping initiated economic reform and social opening, Old Shenzhen walls crumble, held in tenuous place through ad hoc measures, while unhinged doors slouch carelessly, indifferent to neoliberal respectability; razing these buildings is–like building them was–merely a question of time. Pictures of Ludan Village, July 6, 2008.

仙湖植物园: Fairylake

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yesterday, seema and i went to the hongfa temple (弘法寺) in honor of grave sweeping day (清明节). the temple is in the eastern part of the fairylake botanical garden.

during the early eighties, anthropologists noticed that there was a religious revival in china, with many temples being restored. however, in 1985, when construction began, hongfa was the first new temple built since 1949. another shenzhen first. indeed, construction work began five years before china’s first macdonald’s opened in dongmen.

i was struck by the bright orange glazed tile roofs and took a lot of pictures. during imperial times, glazed tiles were used exclusively on the buildings of the imperial palace or the homes of nobles and high ranking officials. chinese architects used yellow (orange), green, blue, and black tiles. each color had symbolic meaning. the yellow (orange) tiles signified the emperor and were only used on the roofs of royal palaces, mausoleums, gardens, and temples.

during the 1980s in shenzhen, architects used glazed tiles to adorn homes, walls, arches, hotels, museums, and restaurants. these remnants of an earlier aesthetic, which is often dismissed today as being “provincial (土)” encourage speculation about how early shenzhen residents borrowed from the past in order to imagine and create the future. on the one hand, the use of glazed tiles speaks to a democratic impulse–what’s good for the emperor is good for the common person. on the other hand, they also speak to totalitarian ambitions–i want to be king. indeed, the experience of freedom and release from convention that early shenzhen residents once described to me as that “shenzhen spirit” seems rooted in this contradiction.

an example from fieldwork, many years ago. in 1996, my mother visited and we went to beijing. we wanted to visit the beijing university campus, however, it was early july and so there were active restrictions on who could and could not enter. that same year, same month, i walked into the shenzhen municipal government without signing in. the guards knew me and waved me through. i then went to my friend’s office to continue interviews about population and urban planning.

this, of course, remains shenzhen’s central contradiction. on the one hand, many of china’s earliest critical magazines and journals were published here. on the other, shenzhen continues to produce some of the most dogmatic propaganda. on the one hand, there is a great deal of choice because everything here can be bought and sold. on the other hand, because choice is reduced to market choice, the political significance of many items is effectively blunted.

most visitors to shenzhen see either the limitless possibility that markets promise or the lack of social movements. in this way, shenzhen is either praised as an examplar of the benefits of capitalism or condemned as lacking any kind of public culture, depending on whether the visitor’s point of view. it seems to me more helpful to think about how this contradiction has been lived in the everyday life.

people who have come to shenzhen do experience a loosening of the conventions that govern behavior inland. however, this loosening has produced many individual efforts to bring about new possibilities for themselves and their families, rather than collective change. what remains to be seen is how this might open itself to a more egalitarian society, rather than remaining an egalitarianism defined by the idea that everyone has a chance to get rich.

五湖四海：shenzhen’s symbolic geography

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As Shenzhen continues to raze its past, investing more and more in the symbols of global urbanism, it become increasingly difficult to remember that the city was planned and built within the the symbolic world of Maoism. The manifest logic of building Shenzhen was that of the model city (on the order of Daqing), while the actual practice was that of rustification–shipping young people out of cities to the countryside in order to realize socialism.

The symbolic geography of Maoism included the natural world. During the 1980s, Shenzhen was famous for its “五湖四海 (five lakes and four oceans)”. The referent was a quotation from Mao Zedong, “我们都是来自五湖四海，为了一个共同的革命目标，走到一起来了 (we have come from everywhere [literally: from the five lakes and four oceans] to achieve a shared revolutionary goal.” Early shenzhen leaders mapped these five lakes and four oceans onto Shenzhen’s extant geography. The five lakes were: East Lake, Silver Lake, Xili Lake, Xiangmi Lake, and Shiyan Lake. The four oceans were the Big and Little Meisha Beaches, Shekou, Daya Bay, and Shenzhen Bay.

The thing about blunt interpretations of Maoism is that it opens the door to all sorts of ideological speculation. What does it mean, that Shekou and Shenzhen Bay have been completely reshaped through land reclamation? That the Meisha beaches are now high end real estate? That Daya Bay is the site of Shenzhen’s six nuclear power plants?

The transformation of Shenzhen’s coastline, notwithstanding, traces of Maoism remain more visible near the five lakes, perhaps because they were early on designated important sites and therefore more difficult to raze. Maoist traces in Shenzhen take several forms. First, scale. Maoist Shenzhen architecture is small scale, built for imagined city of half to one million people. Two, technology. Maoist Shenzhen architecture was built out of cement and required little technology to erect a building. these low buildings were framed by the environment. Indeed, Maoist shenzhen had an almost southeast Asian feel.Three, roads. Maoist Shenzhen roads were one to two lanes wide. Four, walking paths. Maoist Shenzhen walking paths meandered through gardens, reproducing original walking paths. Moreover, there were few if no borders within sites. Today, barbed wire and new walls. Five, landscaping. Maoist Shenzhen greenification was based on native plants that thrived even in the absence of aggressive gardening. In short, the Maoist aesthetic was also high modernist.

Yesterday, I visited one of the five lakes, East Lake Park. Established in 1961 as “reservoir park (水库公园),” in 1984, the Shenzhen municipal government changed the park’s name to “East Lake”. East Lake retains much that is Maoist and beautifully high modernist. Indeed, in an explicit reference to the establishment of the SEZ, the Shenzhen Art Museum was celebrating its 30th anniversary. Pictures of the museum give a sense of another aesthetic, which now reads as inscribed history.

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玩品味: shenzhen antiquities market

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yan ling shopping for jade

yesterday, i went with two friends to the shenzhen antinquities market (深圳古玩市场), which is located in huangbeiling (黄贝岭). now we hadn’t started out in huangbeiling, but rather langxin (浪心) and it took us an hour to get from langxin, which is in baoan district to huangbeiling, which is luohu. at lunch, a jun had offered to take me to the antiquities market because i was interested in old things. true enough, but i was content to prowl around langxin. only later did i realize that he had been wanting to go to the antiquities market all morning. a piece of jade had his heart itching (心痒痒) and he just had to have it. while at the market, a stone carving caused yan ling’s heart to itch and after much negotiating, walking away and returning to the peddler, she also just had to have it. i left with a small stone chop. yan ling promissed to introduce me to a man who could carve 马丽安, the characters for my chinese name into the stone.

a jun became interested in jade about fifteen years ago, and began seriously collecting about three years ago. i asked him what he does with his jade. he said he goes home, listens to music, brews some tea, and takes out the pieces to admire, rubbing them into oily smoothness. “jade,” a jun explained, “should be moist (润).” yan ling laughed, teasing, “you’ve started to play with taste (玩品味).”

as i understand it, “play with taste” means not simply to cultivate good taste, but to start consuming various items associated with good taste; learning through trial and error, which tasteful objects satisfy an itching heart. players need knowledge to distinguish fakes from the genuine and they need passion to take the time to sort through everything out there. and there’s a lot of it. two levels in fact.

on the first level of the antiquities market, peddlers spread their wares out on blankets, having paid 50 rmb to rent the space for the day. yan ling liked this area especially because she assumed everything was fake, and therefore cheap. however, she stumbled upon a fujian peddler, who had some genuine but low quality stones for sale. a jun encouraged her to buy if she liked because even if it cost as much as a dinner, it would give more than one evening of pleasure. a jun, however, shopped on the second level, where ostensibly song dynasty ceramics and expensive jades were on display. he had made friends with several dealers as well as with other afficionados. they would sit together with a dealer examining and debating the merits of each object. i stood on the side an listened, occassionally adding little to the conversation except to say, “yes, it’s nice,” or “how can you tell the jade is that valuable?”

my last visit to huangbeiling was in 2003 with fat bird as part of the “human city” series of guerilla performances. that particular day, we were interested in visiting the pet market and using the cages of inappropriately fuzzy dogs as our stage. what occurs to me know, is how pets have become a way that shenzheners play with taste. as are the paintings at dafen village, at least if the publicity is to be believed.

so i come to the point of this entry. eleven years ago, when i first came to shenzhen, not many people played with taste. most were busy pursuing the shenzhen dream: a shenzhen identity card, a full time job, and a house. however, now, those who have achieved the shenzhen dream are pursuing other interests, including the cultivation of good taste. as in other parts of the advanced capitalist world, shopping has become an important way for individuals to create, express, and experience themselves as both part of and different from society at large.

photos of us playing with taste are now up in my galleries.

旧村改新：initial observations

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this is another thoughts-in-progress entry. these past few days, i have been trying to organize thoughts about the 旧村改新 (old village make-overs), a recent government initiative to clean-up shenzhen’s new villages (now understood as “old”). this was part of the reason for posting on luohu; i actually took that series of pictures last december, but the juxtaposition of new luohu village, the era of two cities building, the new housing development, and the renovated train station point to issues that come together in the make-over initiative. so if you haven’t yet, you may want to first take a walk about luohu.

the point, of course, is simple: there are many shenzhens and they all abut one another. indeed, it’s as difficult to miss new villages, which have a distinctive layout and architecture, as it is to overlook a high-end housing development. these different urban forms actualize the different development trajectories that shenzhen’s villagers and white-collar migrants have pursued. that is to say, even if we bracket for the moment the question of whether or not shenzhen has deep, imperial history, nevertheless, it has been over 25 years since deng xiaoping began reform and opening just north of hong kong. architecture styles and urban plans actualize different moments in this process, providing a material history of the city. with the village make-over initiative, the government seems determined to remove traces of historic difference, even as cultural officials continue to moan about shenzhen’s lack of history. below is a picture of the arch at the entrance to huanggang new village.

the old village make-over initiative first came to my attention over dinner last year, when friends were discussing the government’s decision to raze 18 mid-rise buildings), right at the huanggang cross-border checkpoint. the topic came up not because those at the table disagreed with the make-over process, but because this was the first time china was simultaneously imploding 18 buildings. the event was know as “china’s first blast (全国第一爆).the buildings belonged to yunong village (渔农村). if memory holds, the conversation focused on the technology involved, the need for a modern area to face hong kong, and the avarious fearlessness of villagers, who continued to errect illegal, rental properties.

this past year, i have watched construction teams lay the foundations for a new yunong with something of a jaded eye. this is not the first time that the municipal government had directed a movement specifically at shenzhen’s urban villages. and in a certain sense, it often feels like a more of the same kind of project.

in 1991, the government initiated the rural urbanization movement (农村城市化运动) with the goal of integrating all villages into the municipal government and giving all shenzhen peasants, citizen status. this was called the double transformation. this movement finally ended in august 2004, when baoan and longgang districts announced that all villages had been redistricted and all villagers had been given a new hukou. shenzhen was thereby the first city in china to have neither villages nor villagers within its borders.

for officials determined to turn their city into a global, international city, the end of rural shenzhen was a major milestone. indeed, in this area shenzhen has been heralded as a national leader. these administrative changes, however, did not irradicate the visceral spatial differences between shenzhen villages and the surrounding city.

in order to deepen the integration of the villages into the fabric of the city, shenzhen officials turned their gaze to the built environment as a sign of rural-urban difference. consequently, the following year, in 2005, the government decided to start the old village make-over initiative. crudely, this entails razing what are known as “handshake buildings” and replacing them with modern residential developments. handshake buildings are so-called because they are so close to each other that neighbors can reach out their windows or across their balconies and shake hands. the initiative includes building plazas and public areas, as well as different kinds of housing developments. i include a picture of a row of handshake buildings, huanggang new village.

compare with an image of the new urban dreams currently under construction in huanggang:

the old village make-over initiative was formally approved on october 28, 2005. it is a special five-year plan to improve the urban villages (城中村), speed up urbanization, promote the unification of infrastructure within and outside the sez, realize the joint planning and harmonious development of urban villages and other areas in the city, and to advance the architecture of a global, modern, and key city, errect a harmonious and efficient shenzhen. the curious can check out the full old village make-over plan online.

nevertheless, the question of make-overs and everyday life only became interesting the other day, when i was in shuiwei and huanggang, two of the futian villages that abut the hong kong border. frankly, i was impressed with the layout of shuiwei’s culture plaza, which boasts a funky (if derivative) outdoor stage, a curious rocks museum (the rocks are mainly from guangxi), and a library. i also had tea at a colorful hong kong style teashop, where the milk tea was strong and rich. suddenly, i wanted to move from tianmian, which is conveniant but not like shuiwei. (the lack of tasty but reasonable restaurants in tianmian is a bone of ongoing contention. after all, one of the defining features of the urban villages has been the quality and price of the restaurants.)

my desire to move to shuiwei points to an underlying fact about new village life; the primary source of income for most villagers is rental property. this has meant that villagers have built as densely and as highly as possible, with little concern for the overall environment. it also has meant a density of cheap beauty and massage parlors, restaurants, places to play mah johng, food markets. indeed, since the mid-1990s, as most of shenzhen’s factories have been pushed outside city limits, the importance of rental property and services to village economies has grown. the main residents of the villages are low income migrants, usually from the countryside.

it seems that the ratio of villagers to migrants in the villages concerns the government. the villages maintain their own militias (民兵) that act as a police force within village borders, shifting social regulation from the state to these quasi-governmental organizations. according to futian government statistics, for example, there were 19,353 villagers registrared in 15 administrative villages (there are 20 natural villages in futian.) those villagers provided housing for 572,143 migrants. a ratio of 1 villager for every 29.5 migrants. (these figures do not include unregistered migrants, some of whom live in illegal housing, but others who live in the underground walkways that connect villages to the city proper.) these migrant laborers are precisely the persons regularly identified in the press and popular opinion as causing social unrest. outside the sez in baoan and longgang districts, the villager to migrant ratio is even higher. thus, this research suggests that the greatest challenge facing the make-over movement is a contradiction between the villagers’ economic interest (as landlords) and the state’s interest in maintaining social discipline.

i conclude with a picture of the home of the shuiwei militia (水围民兵之家).

罗湖：a tale of two cities

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sometimes, the ethnography is already there, simply waiting to be recorded. above is a picture of the era of two cities building, located just next to the luohu train station. shenzhen and hong kong are the two cities implied and celebrated by the building. yet, just a quick walk through the bus station, past the two cities building, and next to the bus station parking lot, one enters an alleyway, where other folks live. a third city. one then moves onto luohu new village, where a poster encourages shenzheners to build a civilized city. below is a map that locates you while on your walk about luohu.

shennan rd, part 2

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Walking further east on Shennan Road, from the old city hall building toward the train station, what becomes clear is the extent to which we might describe urbanization in Shenzhen as a process of “the city surrounds the countryside”. This phrase, a reworking of the Maoist revolutionary maxim that “the countryside surrounds the city” points to the geographic shift that has enabled the transition from rural revolution to urban reform. Under Mao, revolution was understood as starting in rural areas and spreading to urban areas. Although the revolutionaries aimed to modernize China, they nevertheless first occupied rural areas and then liberated urban areas. Thus, the Maoist slogan referred to a military strategy. In contrast, under Deng, reform was understood to entail freeing up urban processes in order to allow the economy to develop naturally. Consequently, the Shenzhen inversion of Maoism makes explicit the shift from political to economic concerns, even as it maintains the occupation of land as central to historic process. All too crudely, we might say that for Mao, the occupation of territory was conceptualized as a political process that was to bring about economic change. In contrast, under Deng, the occupation of territory was understood as an economic project, which had political consequences.

What is interesting to think about in terms of Shenzhen’s rural urbanization, is how the rural and the backward (in need of modernization) constantly change as new areas are developed. Thus, areas that ten, fifteen years ago were considered modern are today looking worse for wear. These now constitute the relative rural, which needs to be updated. The process of ruralizing the urban with respect to newer, taller, more modern urban spaces creates a particular kind of urban geography, one of poorer eddies, or (quite literally because they stand in the shadows of taller buildings) dark holes that are surrounded by shiny new buildings. The relative poverty of these pockets is of a different kind than the kind of isolation that has taken place in Shenzhen’s new villages, which are actually well off. Instead, these pockets are the manifestation of a necessary dialectic in which progress is measured by overcoming what already exists—there is a necessary surpassing of these older areas.

I think I’ll write more about the creation of ghettos and its particular manifestation in Shenzhen in another entry. Today, I want to call attention to the ongoing contradictions, but also the shiny brightness of Shenzhen construction during the 1990s. These images can be seen at: http://pics.livejournal.com/maryannodonnell/gallery/0000prqq