Tag Archives: response

icon article about shenzhen

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mucho press about shenzhen lately. i just stumbled across this article by justin mcguirk in icon, an architecture magazine out of london. datewise, the article precedes the rolling stone and ny times articles by about three months; and there is the obligatory reference to dubai. i don’t know all that much about dubai, other than it shares with shenzhen a love of high-priced highrises. but according to jonathan, who is sitting next to me, what’s interesting about the shenzhen-dubai comparison is that the two cities are only comparable in the western mind’s eye. but i’m too tired to think through how dubai makes shenzhen legible.

anyway, overall, the icon article is long on attitude and short on information. some quotes:

Shenzhen is a border town – Tijuana on steroids. Clinging to the Shenzhen River that separates it from Hong Kong, it is a parasite city, feeding off the capitalist wealth of its neighbour.

In fact, everything in Shenzhen is cheaper, so the Hong Kongese cross in droves, stocking up with the vim of ferryborne Brits raiding Calais for wine. The Shenzhen side of the border at Luohu is a classic grey market of cheap cigarettes and prostitution. Rich Hong Kong businessmen keep their mistresses in Shenzhen.

Occasionally you’ll glimpse a backroom full of diligent copyists – skillful artisans fuelling a global trade in tat: made in China, sold in Wal-Mart.

mcquirk also managed to cite me at my snidest:

“Shenzhen is quite cosmopolitan now,” says Mary Ann O’Donnell, an expat American teacher who has lived here for 13 years. “There’s a lifestyle for the leisure class in place, and ten years ago that wasn’t true.” She adds, referring to the biennale, “Suddenly all the pretty culture people are in Shenzhen.”

and then mcguirk adds:

The image of this city – a light but permanent smog clinging to the skyline of unlovely towers – can belie the idea of a leisure class at all. And yet it is well stocked with large and formally landscaped parks and, north of the city, boasts the biggest golf course in the world. But, like Dafen, the leisure zones can take on a surreal quality. To the west is a series of theme parks. The largest, Window of the World, offers visitors “the cream of world civilisation”. At 108m high, the replica Eiffel Tower is no slouch, and acts as a genuine urban landmark, dwarfing the nearby pyramids of Giza, French chateau, Dutch gabled houses and pigmy Taj Mahal. As a gesture, there is something sinisterly pacifying about the park, as though it were asking, “Why would you want to leave Shenzhen when the whole world is here?”

sinisterly pacifying? i’m not sure what people come to see in shenzhen. i know my father loved it here, but what my father loved is what many chinese people love: capitalist opportunity. i remember seeing the play shopping and fucking while in houston (shenzhen’s actual sister city), and i paraphrase: “making money is barbarbism, but having money is civilization.” so what’s at stake is when precisely making becomes having, but also legible as civilization.

talk of a global future (revised june 25, 2008)

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Over the past few years, Shenzhen has emerged on the American public’s map of China and all sorts of people have been using the municipality to talk about globalization. Just recently, Rolling Stone published Naomi Klein’s articleAll Seeing Eye (sz fieldnote here), and on June 8, 2008 the New York Times Magazine architecture issue published The New, New City by Nicolai Ouroussoff. Indeed, these articles constitute part of a growing public literature on Shenzhen, which includes The Power of Migrants, Wall-Mart Nation, In Chinese Boomtown, Middle Class Pushes Back, and the more general, China’s Instant Cities. In tone, these articles are slightly less sensationalist than Newsweek’s 1999 article Wasted Youth, in which Mahlon Meyer commemorated the tenth anniversary of 6.4 by visiting Shenzhen and suggesting “For Those On The Fringe, Post-Tiananmen China Is A World Of Disaffected Punks And Casual Sex. This May Be Good.”

The diversity of topics, notwithstanding, these articles all use urbanization in Shenzhen to ask: What will the global future be? Who’s creating it? Where is it taking shape? When did it first appear? Why is like this? How can we participate in it? The architects in Ouroussoff’s article are clearly aware of this.

“The old contextual model is not very relevant anymore,” Jesse Reiser, an American architect working in Dubai, told [Ouroussoff] recently. “What context are we talking about in a city that’s a few decades old? The problem is that we are only beginning to figure out where to go from here.”

“The irony is that we still don’t know if postmodernism was the end of Modernism or just an interruption,” Koolhaas told [Ouroussoff] recently. “Was it a brief hiatus, and now we are returning to something that has been going on for a long time, or is it something radically different? We are in a condition we don’t understand yet.”

Indeed, more than any other group (in English), architects have been debating the shape, form, and meaning of the municipality. See, for example, In Shenzhen: City of Expiration and Regeneration.

Lately I wonder if Americans have difficulty thinking Shenzhen because the “suddenness” that we are experiencing is an effect of journalism. Unquestionably, journalists’ discovery of Shenzhen has been abrupt. However the city has been under construction for thirty years and China has been pursuing industrial urbanization projects since 1949. Much of what is happening today in Shenzhen grows out of those past years, and in within the context of local and national history, Shenzhen’s urban growth begins to make sense.

For example, urban villages (城中村) and handshake buildings (握手楼) are neither recent, nor original to the city. Indeed, what are now called urban villages were once called new villages (新村). The early Shenzhen administration, which at the time was not a municipal government annexed village land for urban construction and assigned villages land for pursuing their own livelihood. At the time planners imagined that the villagers would provision the new industrial zone with food. New villages were thus first constructed within this model of urban-rural co-dependency. Consequently, the first generation of new village housing were two to three story private homes. However, villagers immediately realized there was more to be made through smuggling, small businesses, and rental property. The so-called handshake buildings are second generation buildings, which were built on plats determined through a re-negotiation of new village lands and actualize more fully the transformation of village residential housing into rental property. At the same time, urban growth meant that residential and commercial areas soon surrounded, but did not annex the villages, resulting in the effect today of urban-within-villages (the literal translation of 城中村).

In addition, most Americans are unfamiliar with levels of population density in Chinese cities. We are not accustomed to thinking at a scale beyond baby cities of a couple hundred thousand. China’s population (1.3 billion) is roughly 4 times that of the US (300 million). When using that crude, very crude formula all sorts of things come into perspective. Houston (estimated population 4 million), for example, would have an adjusted population of 16 million, falling between Shenzhen (estimated population of 10-12) and Shanghai, China’s largest city (estimated population of 20-odd million). NYC (pop 8 mil.) would have an adjusted population of 32 million. Chongqing–now an independent city and fasted growing urban complex on the planet–has an estimated population of 30-odd million. Yet most Americans have never heard of Chongqing, which has been characterized in the western press as “invisible“.

In the Fall of 1999, I had several job interviews at the annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association. One of my interviewers asked, “What’s global about Shenzhen?” That question flummoxed me. After five years of living and working in Shenzhen, I took it as self-evident that Shenzhen had always been global. For me the more interesting question was—what isn’t global here? I spent several critical moments trying to ascertain if the question had been asked ironically, and then began to explain that the SEZ had been established in 1980 to reform and open the Chinese socialist political-economy. Reform entailed dismantling the structures of urban work units and rural communes; opening meant allowing foreign capital to fund and profit from this process. Of course, the Chinese government hoped to control how investment occurred, but foreign capital came with all sorts of price tags, some expected others not. The process actualized both the direction and context of Shenzhen’s construction. On the one hand, the goal was to become an international city. On the other hand, the investors, architects, and workers who came to Shenzhen had diverse ideas of what it meant to be international. Of course, what has been built and is under construction exceeds all of that. Exponentially.

In retrospect, it seems clear that I misunderstood the point of the question, which I now understand to be—what do we [scholars of rural Latin America] have in common with Shenzhen? I wanted to talk about Shenzhen with respect to Chinese history since 1949; they wanted to talk about Shenzhen in ways that illuminated and could be enriched by their research on indigenous Andean societies. We could have found common ground to accommodate all concerns, but it would have meant shifting our perspectives, decentering our cognitive maps, and listening more than we were accustomed to doing. Consequently, taking globalization as a topic of conversation didn’t enable us to accommodate international diversity, let alone find a topic that was mutually interesting. Instead, talking about globalization ironically confirmed the borders of our conversational homelands, reproducing the intellectual provincialism that often shapes discourse—academic and otherwise.

The conversations that Americans are having about Shenzhen now constitute an important component of our understanding, evaluation, and realization of globalization. Yet, at present the discourse has yet to leave familiar territory: distopian futurism and exultant capitalism. I think the reason for the impasse is, in part, that we’re still talking about the future of American cities, rather than what might be a truly international future. We have not yet created the perspective necessary to imagine, discuss, and evaluate what it means to live in cities that are simultaneously diverse and co-dependent.

all seeing eyes

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several days ago, i read naomi klein’s article china’s all-seeing eye and viewed the accompanying photographs by thomas lee. since then, i have been thinking about how seriously to take her claims, how shenzhen functions in her argument, how shenzhen appears in lee’s images, and the cultural politics of guan (管), which are importantly similar to and different from the cultural politics of foucault’s panopticism.

in “all-seeing eye”, klein discusses globalization in terms of the cooperation between u.s. and chinese companies to develop and integrate surveillance technologies. according to the article, the goal of “golden shield” is to make it possible to cross-reference data from cellphones, computers, cameras, facilitating the surveillance of chinese citizens and, in institutions, workers. in turn, the goal of these companies is to sell the technology back to the united states, where it would be used.

shenzhen functions in this argument as the new kind of place that makes this kind of development possible. neither chinese nor american, but rather the place where china becomes more like the united states and the united states more like china, shenzhen is the place where capitalism and totalitarianism are reworked into “market stalinism,” which is then redeployed throughout the rest of china and exported to the united states. on klein’s reading, “market stalism” combines the worst excesses of both socialism and capitalism and is the inner logic of globalism. in this argument china stands for socialism and the united states for capitalism.

rolling stone published lee’s photos to illustrate klein’s report. the photographs’ formal composition and klein’s article become a reader’s primary tools for interpreting shenzhen. however, here’s the rub: in an interview, klein states that her goal is to “show how u.s. and china more and more alike, creation of a middle ground”. however, the photographer, thomas lee invoked the aesthetic conventions of creative photography to organize photographic composition. in these pictures, people in the foreground are blurred, while the background is in focus. consequently, the images show a shenzhen that is depersonalized and off-kilter. for an american viewer, these pictures do not provide common ground, rather its opposite—a looming gulf that threatens to swallow anyone who would dare cross over.

for foucault, jeremy bentham’s panopticon is the paradigm of how surveillance technologies secure modern power. the panopticon is not a thing, but rather a particular organization of space, specifically a prison. at the center of panoptic space is a tower, which is surrounded by buildings, divided into cells, where large windows allow the supervisor to observe the inmates of the prison. importantly, although the inmates can see the tower, they cannot see the supervisor. moreover, the arrangement of the cells insures that the inmates are isolated from one another.

the panopticon illustrates several important aspects of modern power. first, it operates even if no one is in the tower; inmates cannot know when they are and are not being watched. this means that they must act as if they are always being watched. second, the supervisor is also placed in power relations; the supervisor must also assume that he is being watched at all times. indeed, it is more likely the case that the supervisor is always being watched than any one inmate. third, the environment is designed so that no one individual can assume power, instead the inmates and the supervisor are placed within a physical environment that is itself the form of power; both the supervisor and the inmates are subordinated to the requirements of the environment.

the connections between klein’s “all-seeing eye” and the panopticon are relatively clear. the new surveillance technologies enable government officials, police officers, and management to use the built environment to monitor citizens and workers. in addition to cameras, these technologies include accessing individuals through their cell phones, internet practices, credit card records, and digitalized data banks. in addition, those positioned as “supervisors” are themselves also subject to surveillance. finally, the ability to monitor others is diffused throughout the system, making all members of society variously positioned supervisors and inmates. thus, the key distinction between citizens is how deeply one is embedded in these relationships and, by extension, how much control over the use of these technologies one has. however, no one member of society has absolute access to and therefore absolute control over the surveillance apparatus.

how do the cultural politics of panopticism (so glossed) differ from the cultural politics of guan (to be glossed)? in shenzhen, guan refers to practices of taking charge, ranging from teaching a student how to hold a pen through organizing social events to directing traffic and enforcing laws. like panoptic methods, guan practices target human bodies. teachers routinely hold a student’s hands when she is learning to write; the organization of events often entails mass calisthenics or the performance of many bodies in coordinated action—at our school, marching is considered one of the signs of effective pedagogy; directing traffic and law enforcement both entail the placement of bodies with respect to each other within a given environment. this is important: like panopticism, guan authorizes certain forms of violence in order to bring bodies into alignment with society. both tian’anmen and currently, tibet are examples of guan. moreover, like panopticism, guan practices presuppose constant monitoring. the image of chinese students doing homework, while their mother, father, and grandparents watch and intervene exemplifies guan.

however, unlike panopticism, guan practices draw legitimacy from the understanding that disciplining bodies is a form of caretaking. in this sense, guan requires the physical presence of those who guan and those who are guan-ed. as such, there are many instances of people excessively guan-ing those in their charge. excessive guan-ing makes for tiring social relations. both the guan-er and the guan-ed find themselves in constant negotiation. for many teachers and students at my school, for example, guan-ing a student’s homework is a necessary evil. nevertheless, guan is unquestionably better than the alternative, which would be “not to guan,” leaving the child to do whatever she wanted to, but failing to help prepare her to take high school and college entrance exams. a similar logic characterizes many chinese criticisms of the government. if schools collapse in an earthquake; it is a result of a failure to guan. if those who failed to guan continue in power, it is also a failure to guan. hunger, unemployment, social unrest—all are symptoms of governmental failure to guan.

on foucault’s reading, guan is not a modern form of power. however, most of my Chinese friends don’t trust abstract monitoring; they believe in the physical absence of a guan-er is an untenable. they point to the fact that many of the surveillance cameras don’t work, cellphone sim cards are bought, sold, and disposed of at unregulated street kiosks (i.e. cellphone numbers are unregistered in china), and its relatively easy to hack around the great firewall. in other words, the clearest difference between the cultural politics of panopticism and guan is the assumption of how successful surveillance actually can be. insofar as the underlying metaphor of panopticism is incarceration, it presupposes human bodies are always already at the disposal of surveillance operations. in contrast, guan presupposes that human bodies constantly allude surveillance operations.

chinese parents and teachers repeatedly lament that little bodies may be placed at desks and isolated from other little bodies, and yet the supervisors still cannot guan their charges, whose “hearts are not in place (心不在焉)” and “spirits absent themselves (出神)”. at the social level, it is even more difficult to ensure proper guan-ing. most of my friends assume that if something is being guan-ed, it is because someone has a penchant for excessive guan-ing (like a busybody), has been forced to take charge (by public opinion), or has a private agenda (internal politics). indeed, many have resigned themselves to the impossibility of successfully guan-ing children and colleagues, let alone the country. “can you guan it (管得了吗)?” they frequently sigh in a social world where peasants frequently protest change, students and netizens argue for increasing freedoms, and tibetans continue to protest han rule.

panopticism infuses klein’s interpretation of new surveillance technologies. her critique draws its power from the fact that no one wants to be locked up, monitored, and isolated from human companionship. indeed, the panopticon provides a working model of how to deny human beings our humanity. in contrast, the underlying metaphor of guan is disciplinary care-taking; as a form of social power it draws legitimacy from the fact that all of us has been guan-ed. indeed, guan provides a working model of how to transform babies into social beings, and individuals into “company men” and “citizens”.

as an american, i have a visceral aversion to the world that klein describes in “all seeing eye”. as a resident of shenzhen, i wonder how likely it is that such a world can come into existence. i have difficulty imaging how many supervisors would be needed to actually make such supervision effective. after red lights have been run, cellphone numbers regularly changed, and great firewalls hacked, it seems interesting to ask how effective surveillance technologies can be in the absence of social support for them. i find it easier to imagine that these technologies might be used to target certain individuals and groups.

that is to say, that in order for surveillance technologies to function, one must also circumscribe freedom of movement in order to successfully monitor and through this monitoring, control the actions of a group of people. when moving surveillance into an undefined space, it seems necessary to limit the number of surveillance targets an institution can successfully monitor. i can imagine searching for one or two people; i have difficulty imagining how one would monitor several thousand, or ten thousand, or three million. consequently, i believe that the successful use of surveillance technologies necessitates the concomitant targeting, monitoring and isolating specific groups of people such as workers in a factory, students in a plaza, monks in a monastery, travelers on an airplane, residents of apartment complexes. in this sense, effective surveillance requires some form of social consent in addition to the construction of an environment in which everyone might monitor everyone else–a time and place more like a cultural revolutionary chinese work unit than it is like contemporary shenzhen.

in shenzhen, the most blatant and pervasive surveillance abuses occur at work, where supervisors control workers’ bodies by placing them on assembly lines or at desks. supervisors further control these bodies through compulsory overtime. factory dormitories also give supervisors off the clock access to worker lives. but again, on the clock, if supervisors physically leave the premises, workers talk, relax, head off to the restaurant. in mandarin, they say “superiors have policy, inferiors have counter policy (上有政策，下有对策)”. and, of course, off the clock, workers leave the factories and head into unsupervised spaces.

what concerns me in klein’s argument is her assertion that becoming more like china means becoming more totalitarian. i believe her when she says that these technologies are being built. i believe her when she argues that their are chinese and american officials who want to install more effective surveillance technologies. however, i also believe that if one’s goal is to turn society into a prison, it is not enough simply to install these technologies. one must also convince a population to accept monitoring of themselves (at work or in an airport, for example) and of targeted individuals and groups (middle easterners and tibetans, for example). in this respect, totalitarianism is not only a set of architectural practices, but also and more fundamentally, a set of social practices that are not uniquely “chinese”.

i support klein’s anti-totalitarianism. however, i also hope that the effectiveness of her rhetoric does not depend upon reducing the diversity of chinese people to the stereotype of “unthinking subjects of a totalitarian state”. the united states can only become more totalitarian through the actions of our citizens and leaders, not through the actions of people anywhere else, our cultivated fear of them, notwithstanding.

Cruel/Loving Bodies

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This weekend (July 8 and 9), I had the pleasure of participating in a roundtable discussion of Cruel/Loving Bodies 2 project, which is on display at the Hong Kong Arts Centre from July 8 through July 28. The Pao Gallery on the fifth floor and the Goethe Gallery on the fourteenth floor are co-presenting the exhibition. Cruel/Loving Bodies 1 was exhibited at Shanghai’s Duolun Museum of Modern Art (June 2004) and Beijing’s 798 Space (July 2004).

This was the first time I have contributed to an art discussion and, not unsurprisingly, approached it as if it were an anthropology meeting, understanding my role to be that of discussant. I came to play a familiar head game, reading textualized bodies against themselves, against each other, and if time permitted, against other texts. My jaw clenched at the responsibilities that my imaginary job description intimated; what would I say if asked, “What influences do you see in the work of Mayling TO? (杜美玲)” However, the experiences of viewing “Here We Are” with artist Lesley SANDERSON, sucking an ice pop with HE Chengyao (何成瑶), and dubbing Deep Throat as part of ZHENG Bo’s (郑波)“Watch porn, learn English” movement jolted, if only momentarily, corporeal habits. And I expectedly found myself remembering to play hide and seek.

When playing hide and seek, children want to be found. If you don’t find them within what they think is a reasonable amount of time, they will call out to you. In turn, if they can’t find you, they become frustrated, expecting a return call. After all, the point is to find and be found; the seeking is simply a means of enhancing the pleasure, not an end in itself. I think this commonplace observation points to a practical understanding of the fine line between love and cruelty. In hide and seek, love is the effort to find the person, cruelty the refusal.

Most of the time, I don’t play. Instead, my shoulders tighten, my eyes squint, and my heart makes judgments about my interlocutor based on superficial signs—skin color, hair texture, body height and mass, the smell of sweat and light perfume, the drape of a skirt, the polish of leather shoes. Together, these signs suggest how the woman if front of me has treated herself and been treated by others; I too treat her like a lady should be treated. Grimy cheeks, missing teeth, crooked fingers, swollen ankles, rheumy eyes, and sweat-stained clothing also reveal past interactions; unthinkingly, I treat the old peasant like a beggar should be treated.

In presenting bodies in unexpected ways, however, the artists of the Cruel/Loving Bodies project pre-empt habitual interactions. How does one treat, for example, the virtuous women of BAI Chongmin (白崇民) and WU Weihe (吴玮和)? The form echoes that of the Terra-cotta soldiers, but unlike the first Qin Emperor’s guard, these figures have no clear features, except for a number, which corresponds to examples taken from LIU Xiang’s 烈女传. This difference invites the reader to seek: What history brought these signs together in this particular way? Or consider, susan pui san LOK’s (骆佩珊) “Notes on Return”, which skitters across the uneven, indeed flimsy, surface of plastic strips: How can a world become so unstable?

I assume that I know how to treat a lady or a beggar because I assume that their bodies reveal the history that made them who they are. In contrast, the Cruel/Loving bodies compel the viewer to reconsider how these bodies came to be; we don’t know how to treat them because we don’t recognize the processes that formed them. That moment jolts us out of habit as we lurch toward the child’s call: come and find me. Our lady and beggar abruptly seem otherwise as well: what if I have been misrecognizing the signs all along? What if this misrecognition has been a refusal to play? And what if an ability to read the signs has merely enabled me to be cruel?

If in Hong Kong this month, please visit the Cruel/Loving Bodies 2 exhibition at the Hong Kong Arts Centre. The curious can visit the artists’ sites: Leungpo　梁宝山, Zheng Bo, Conroy and Sanderson, susan pui san LOK, and Mayling TO. I have also uploaded some images of the opening weekend.