Tag Archives: musing

shekou relaunch

Posted on by

So the Biennale has been extended two weeks. Good news and great press for the curators, the SZ Center for Design, and China Merchants. And that–generating a Shekou Buzz–has been the point of all this productivity, or as the current campaign is called “Shekou Relaunch”.

This afternoon, I attended one of the final scheduled events, a forum on how to renovate the Dacheng Flour Mill, which has been designated the site of the future Shekou a Industrial Culture Center. The program included repurposing the buildings and designing more public space, a visual culture center, a theater, and an office building. The responses hinged on determining the purpose of the renovated buildings; just what does China Merchants hope to accomplish through these renovations? Just what is being launched again? And why?

Indeed, there is both something primal about the campaign; we are setting off, again (再出发), and yet something equally unsettling; again? How many times do we need to remake society? Or is it just the persistent dissatisfaction of capitalism and vague anxiety that we may never get it right?

I actually believe that creative activity makes people happy, but not redundant assembly line production. I have experienced happiness in creative activity that nourishes my connections with others. I am particularly enjoying 302 because it brings together research interests, social commitments and friendships. I also really, really like working with my hands. This seems to me the goal of social transformation; improving the quality of life of family, friends and neighbors, and not just achieving higher economic indicators.

Today, I’m thinking that to the extent that traditional socialist industrial culture aimed to improve the lives of worker, it offers inspiration for possible renovations and building. However, without a discussion about what’s being relaunched and why, another round of pretty and smart and interesting construction seems to me to be beside the point.

weixin etiquette

Posted on by

Who knew? It’s possible to not view someone’s general weixin posts and to block them from seeing your posts. This way one can accept friend requests, engage in one-to-one texts, and keep a definite distance. This discovery led to a discussion of all the kindly people who are spending too much time forwarding “must reads” and cluttering up virtual space. The conclusion? Don’t become one of those people who get passively blocked by limiting the number of cat photos you upload.

crumbling foundations

Posted on by

The first floor sinking, occupied by migrant workers. Above, several condos have been inhabited, but most floors remain empty, unused except as placeholders on accounting sheets. A section of Houhai Bin Road is being reconstructed. The chilly smog undulates.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

untrustworthy environs

Posted on by

The current Handshake 302 exhibit, Baishizhou Superhero has just finished its opening weekend. We’ve had good press, and people interested in the topic have sent out weixin‘s and weibo‘s to their circles. In fact, the exhibit is fun, and once people come into the space, they clearly enjoy taking pictures of themselves and friends as one of the heroes (curatorial statement, here). And there’s the rub: getting people into the space.

In fact, mobilizing our neighbors to visit the space has been an ongoing project. Yesterday, during the exhibit’s open hours I observed to a visiting friend that for many of Handshake’s neighbors crossing the threshold from observing in the hallway to participating in the exhibition is a huge step taken only after several hallway engagements. In reply, he gave a class and generational analysis that avoided the easy (and prevalent) stereotypes of “Chinese culture” or “national ethos (国情)”, focusing instead on the social cost of trust.

He opened an analysis with a joke about an old woman who was sitting next to the road. A young man is talking on the phone and she overhears him say, “Dad, purchase me 500,000 yuan insurance.” Without waiting for anymore information, the old woman picks up her stool and moves away from the roadside. The (literal) punchline? Accident insurance apparently covers up to 500,000 rmb in compensation and is more than enough to settle cases in which urbanites hit and cripple rural workers, while an old lady wouldn’t get enough to cover her legal expenses and hospital recovery.

Background to the joke: Chinese tort law addresses the question of compensation for injuries sustained in a car accident in terms of a simple equation: average annual salary of place times twenty years. For those older than sixty, one year is removed for each year older than sixty but younger than 75 (so the compensation rate for a 63-year-old would be times 17). Compensation for all people over the age of 75 is times 5. For children not yet one year old, the compensation is also times 5. . There is a published list of average salaries by place (Shenzhen list). In other words, the average salary for a city worker in Shenzhen is 40,741 and for a rural worker is 10,542. So the mean compensation for car accidents falls between 800,000 and 200,000. There is a more detailed list that includes salaried workers, but clearly, for the majority of China’s rural population, they won’t get more than 500, 000 before legal fees.

My friend’s point was simple: the poor can’t afford unexpected encounters and so their first response is one of self-preservation. The old lady didn’t know if the guy on the phone had a car, she didn’t know if he was talking to his father, she didn’t know if he was amusing himself. All she could know was that if he did have a car, 500,000 and wanted to run her over, he probably could. I countered that this was an open door and most had seen me over the past few months. “But,” my friend added, “it’s a closed, private space. Why take a risk for a photograph?”

My friend added that younger peoplewere more open to conversational exchanges with strangers. He said the most reticent were generation 70, but generation 80 and 90 were increasingly open to proactively talking with strangers. And in fact, the few people who have come to the space through weibo and weixin have been in their early 20s, or members of generation 90. He suggested that we should move the photo stand-in to one of the public squares because (1) people really would enjoy it and (2) they’d feel safe to enjoy it in an open place where there were many, many people.

Good — if sobering — advise. It also reminds me that we have had our best turn out when we organized a fair like environment in the Baishizhou public plaza. Consequently, our next goal is to move Superhero to the Baishizhou Culture Square.

renting, home ownership, and rights to the city

Posted on by

When roughly 100,000 people were evicted from Dachong, there was little if any public outrage.The migrants, recent college grads, and low-income families who lived in Dachong seemed inconvenienced by the evictions, but not outraged. My friends and colleagues also expressed dismay at the evictions, but not did not take to the streets in protest. Instead, the general response was one of resignation.

I have been pondering what to make of this lack of attachment to Dachong specifically, but the urbanized villages in general.

The SEZ prides itself on its openness to outsiders, boasting that arriving in the city makes one a Shenzhener. What then to make of the fact that the majority of migrants first live in the urbanized villages, yet don’t consider them homes worth fighting for? Is living in the village a kind of social limbo between neidi and Shenzhen? Is “arrival” contingent on property ownership rather than experience and tenure?

I finally realized that as an American, I have assumed that living — whether as a renter or a home owner — in a neighborhood is a process of inhabitation through which one accrues rights to the city. One of these rights would be compensation for eviction, presumably based on one’s length of residency. But living in a neighborhood would also grant one the right to shape the neighborhood through different associations and to promote neighborhood cultural events.

In contrast, it seems that in Shenzhen not only the majority of people living in the urbanized villages, but also intellectuals, officials, and real estate developers consider renting to be a temporary state; renters do not “naturally” or “inevitably” accrue any rights to the neighborhood and by extension to the city. Instead, only village members have rights to compensation, to organize village events, and shape neighborhood culture.

In this context, the political question becomes one of affordable housing, rather than renters’ rights. As I understand the political ethos, Shenzhen inhabitants believe that the government has the obligation to provide all Shenzhen residents the opportunity to buy a condo. For intellectuals, urban planners and even liberal real estate developers the mass evictions when an urbanized village is razed do not constitute a major scandal. Instead, they see the real source of social unrest to be the fact that even working their entire lives, most people will not be able to purchase a condo.

In short, the government has defaulted on its moral obligation to house the people. The replacement of urbanized villages with upscale housing estates just rubs salt in this very open wound.

coming home to the liberal arts

Posted on by

This past week my friend’s daughter has been visiting liberal arts colleges and I have been tagging along, surprised by my sense of homecoming; these are my people.

I have lived and worked in Shenzhen close to twenty years. I continue to engage in anthropological research about the city and participate as a public intellectual both in Shenzhen and outside, in conversations about Shenzhen and what it teaches us about rural urbanization in the post Cold War era. I work with Fat Bird to produce theater and have recently joined friends to form CZC Special Forces, a group working to make art and performance in and around Shenzhen’s urban villages. Over the years, I have taught English, served as an acting principal, and done the odd bit of college counseling in Shenzhen schools. In short, the city and its residents have been good to me, helping me to craft an interesting and meaningful life.

Indeed, I feel at home in Shenzhen. I live in a late 1980s Shekou housing development, where child play and aunties and grandmas dance the yang ge’er. I know the bus and subway systems intimately. I have favorite restaurants and parks and walks. I appreciate the vast diversity of the city’s migrants and have learned to recognize (some of) the distinctions that matter to Shenzheners — accents, flavoring, and personality, for example. I navigate cross-border encounters, and have friends in Hong Kong and Guangzhou. In all practical senses, Shenzhen is home.

And yet.

Just a week of wandering a few liberal arts campuses and I am reminded of those stateside who also enabled me to live this life. Parents who believed that education was for life rather than strictly the first line on a resume; Chinese teachers who gave me the skills, understanding, and confidence to persist despite linguistic and cultural obstacles; anthropology professors and authors who not only helped me learn to think and consider what it means to be human, but also to value this very human impulse to reflect on our shared condition and its causes, possibilities, and challenges. All this to say that this trip I am realizing just how deeply my values and goals were shaped and nourished by the liberal arts tradition. Yes! the heart sings. This tradition is worth cherishing, and growing, and exporting.

Yet, again.

I also know what it takes for a Shenzhen family to be able to afford this education. I know the decisions and savings and evasions — moral, intellectual, and social — that make it possible to leap from Shenzhen to a liberal arts college campus. So this college visiting has been unremittingly bittersweet. I keep saying to my friend, “See, it is possible to create this kind of learning environment and raise outstanding human beings.” And she rightly reminds me, “Shenzhen people are still worried about securing their children’s economic future.” I pause because she is not wrong. Not only Shenzhen parents find $US 50,000 a year to be a daunting obstacle. American parents. Moroccan parents. Indian parents. Parents everywhere do because we are exporting liberal arts educations. And they cost. A lot. And even more when your family doesn’t earn petro-dollars, but instead earns real estate yuan.

Thought du jour: We need to find ways to realize these values in other, more accessible forms. I continue to believe that our liberal arts colleges and pedagogical values constitute an important contribution to humanity. I am haunted, however, by their obvious and subtle complicities with globalized inequalities. I live this contradiction everyday in Shenzhen, where the liberal arts — or another form of morally tolerant pedagogy and values — are needed, but where as an American, I often find myself so firmly placed on the “haves” side of the line that dialogue is difficult. Indeed, in the end, I end up listening more than speaking because I’m still searching for common ground. And this ground must take into account economic inequality and political aspirations if we are to move forward, together.

what to see when visiting shenzhen…

Posted on by

The other day I had an interesting conversation about Baishizhou with a friend visiting from neighboring Hong Kong. In a nutshell? She asked me what there was to see in Shenzhen that would be intrinsically interesting to someone who knew nothing about Shenzhen. She remarked that it was easy to figure out what to see in Shanghai and Beijing because they had a history. I mentioned that I have blogged on this very topic, including touristy suggestions.

I then said something less gracious to the effect of “If you can’t be bothered to learn about Shenzhen before visiting, maybe you’re not here to visit the city. Maybe you’ve come over to go shopping at the Luohu Mall or Book City.”

The problem, of course, is that ignorent global trotting passes for global chic living. We expect to arrive in an unknown place and to be able to read the lay of the land immediately, as if our homegrown geographies might be easily transported thither and yon. In a sense, the frustration we feel comes from a misplaced sense of entitlement: the world is my oyster. I know oysters. I should be able to open this oyster, grab the pearl and move on to the next delicacy. And while I’m at it, I should have the help of friendly English-speaking underpaid minions, who are not only not going to take advantage of my ignorance, but also show me where to find bigger and better and cheaper oysters because they. like. me.

Arrr.

Of course, tourists don’t want to visit an actual mall; they want something “authentic”. But as my friend pointed out, they don’t want to visit Baishizhou either because it is not self-evidently legible. Tourists — whether homegrown or from elsewhere — want something in-between the global standardized mall and actual working class neighborhoods, something edgey without being dangerously sharp. Something like a cheap Xintiandi (新天地).

And there’s the rub. The expectation that Shenzhen should be immediately legible to tourists and other strangers is itself a species of mall-think. Mall-think refers to the idea that the world has already been standardized into chain-stores that sell, among other things, samples of local history and culture. By extension, mall-think tourism refers to the idea of one-stop tourism (I visit Dongmen, the Civic Center, and Huanggang Village) which will produces a pre-conceived and therefore “intrinsically interesting” experience the Shenzhen difference.

Xintiandi, is of course, the most obvious and obviously successfully of mall-think development. The fact that they are expanding from Shanghai to Chongqing, Foshan, and Guangzhou should really be a wake-up call; Euro-American mall-think is transforming the Chinese landscape into accessible and therefore interesting shopping experiences. The view from Baishizhou reminds us, however, that mall-think tourism confuses global recognition with authenticity, and in doing so fails to see the intrinsic value of working class lives.

there is no city here…

Posted on by

The translation of 城中村 as “urban village” misleads. In fact, it is more accurate to call them urbanized villages, with the understanding that a village is not simply a rural settlement, but also and more importantly a corporate entity. The village settlement became urban, and in the process created a class of corporate land owners, who own the buildings. Thus, for example Baishizhou, where several thousand households control the real estate where 140,000 people live. Dalang Precinct (大浪街道) has an idegenious population of 8,000+ with a migrant worker population of over 500,000. The villages and some villages are not poor, they are the “local rich”.

Dachong, Hubei, Baishizhou — the list of urban villages that have been or are in process of being rennovated (a euphamism for razed and rebuilt) is, of course, the list of the most important real estate developments in contemporary Shenzhen. The plans for these new neighborhoods resemble those of Southern California, with climate controlled buildings, exquisite landscaping, and carefully planned walking areas.All this to say, when not talking about the need for low income housing (for both the working poor and recent college graduates) or rejoicing in the messy, cheap convenience of urban villages, the general Shenzhen consensus about urban villages in general is that the buildings and environment sub-standard. The goal is to replace them with neighborhoods that have enormous shopping malls at their center.

Now, the ideological irritant is the extent to which young intellectuals and urbane Shenzheners have coded the suburban impulse as tasteful, while the guilded buildings of the village corporations are being called “dirt wealth” buildings (土豪楼). In other words, there is something worse than being “exploding” or nouveau riche (暴发户); one could be “vulgar” rich, or 土豪. Indeed, vulgar rich is the term used to describe the skyscrapers and office buildings that villages (or individual villagers) have commissioned. The problem, of course, is that the logic of building vulger rich buildings is the same as building nouveau riche buildings. Urban villages and suburban cities hire the same architectural firms, use the same materials, and aim for the same symbolic ends — to announce their social importance. The only difference is the exterior of these buildings; where’s the guilded tipping point from nouveau to vulgar riche?

More importantly, the cultural coding of suburban urbanization as “tasteful” and rural urbanization as “tacky” misses the point — neither urban typology completely nourishes the human soul because both forms rely upon exploitation and exclusion in order to generate the capital investment necessary to build and rebuild Shenzhen.

price list, shekou, early 1980s

Posted on by

IMG_3454A price list from the Shekou Industrial Zone Life Services Bureau, early 1980s.

Of note? Uniform prices throughout the industrial zone, although some prices were “approximate (左右)”. The reason? typhoons determined availability of food and goods. Also, prices are modified with the characters for renminbi (人民币) because at the time, Hong Kong dollars and Foreign Exchange Certificate (or waihui 外汇), a surrogate currency used by foreigners also circulated. Long ago and far away, one industrial zone, three currencies.

Not only the typeset makes this list seem like it came from another place and time. The prices seem so cheap its hard to remember that these prices were expensive relative to neidi, where monthly salaries still ranged between 20 to 50 rmb.

During the early 1980s, coming to the SEZ and/or Shekou Industrial Zone was considered hard, but nevertheless resulted in opportunities to earn more elsewhere. In fact, by the 1990s, Shenzhen and Shekou boasted a substantial wage (both white and blue-collar ) differential with the rest of the country. And today Shenzhen along with Beijing and Shanghai continues to have the highest lowest minimum wage in the country (see China Labour bulletin report).

Shenzhen’s economic success remains one of the key symbols of the success of post Mao reforms. It is no surprise, therefore that both Guangdong and Shenzhen have been central to Xi Jinping’s ongoing efforts to middle class-ify China. But. The extent to which rural China — both in the form of migrant workers and urban villages — has enabled Shenzhen’s success remains left out of these rags-to-riches scenarios.

moving on up…shenzhen identity and urban villages

Posted on by

Urban villages inform and shape popular understandings of Shenzhen, both domestically and abroad. Intellectuals, also here and elsewhere, have decried the decision to raze villages and put up new and improved postmodern housing estates, offices and shopping malls as it short-sighted and violently anti-working class. However, in Shenzhen, there has been no street level organizing as such to stop the razing; a decision is made, plans approved, people moved.

In this context, it is interesting to note the temporary nature of Shenzhen patterns of inhabitation. Even before settling in to their first dorm room or urban village share, migrants intend to move. This intention might be vague — I’ll move when I get a better job, or buy my house — but “moving on up” is one of the reasons people migrate to the city. Moreover, in practice, people move when they change jobs, they move when they get a raise, they move when they have a partner, they move when their parents come to live with them. They also move as investment strategies, from one home to the next. Indeed, as far as I can tell, people only seem to stop moving (for the time being), when their child is at a desirable school. If the school is undesirable, changing school district zones or moving to parts of the country where gaokao competition is less fierce.

In other words, inhabitation patterns seem to preclude the time necessary to grow attached to neighborhoods. The current fondness for urban villages seems overwhelming is often nostalgic (missing the challenge of first coming to Shenzhen) or political (we need housing for the working poor), but it is rarely the result of long-term living in a village. Many of the people I have interviewed who do live in a village want to leave. They want their own home (not a rental), or if they are a landlord who lives in a handshake, they want to live in a modern high-rise.

All this to say that the lack of grassroots resistance to razing urban villages in Shenzhen isn’t as counter-intuitive as it may seem from the outside. Those who want to keep the villages don’t actually live there, and those who live there are anticipating moving out. Indeed, I have come to believe that the social questions posed by urban villages have less to do with preserving these neighborhoods, as they do with making long-term inhabitation possible. If the villages were places that people actually wanted to live, raise their child, and retire, then there would be a very different political and economic response to the ongoing demolitions.

NOTE: Handshake buildings as a form of local real estate development were an artifact of the 1992 decision to transfer inner district village lands to the city. In the 1980s, villagers built free-standing homes for themselves, and some collective rental properties and dormitories. However, once the 1992 policy limited village land resources, villagers stopped building individual free-standing homes and built multi-story rental buildings. In the outer districts, where land remained under village control until 2004, villagers built neighborhoods of free-standing homes for themselves, and multi-story rental properties next door.