More documentation of historic selectivity than anything else, the photographs below suggest the crafting of Shekou’s meaning in larger Shenzhen discourse; the time is money, efficiency is life billboard has been upgraded, even as one of the old centers of reform, the plaza around the Shekou Theater falls into disrepair, old streets seem strangely empty, graffiti arts paint on construction site walls, and land reclamation has me talking about where the old Dongjiaotou docks used to be.
Tag Archives: shekou
song of the china merchants group
Lest we forget the relationship between art, patriotism, and corporate success, the Song of the China Merchants Group reminds us how easy it is to fall for the singer, rather than observe what’s happening on the ground, say in Shekou. Click and sing along, “You ask how far my ship has travelled”.
seaworld trashed
settled in?
Am now moved into new home in Shekou. Yesterday, rode the Shekou line to Window of the World, changed for OCT East and arrived for coffee at OCT Creative Park all in about 30 minutes. Very convenient. Nevertheless, half an hour was more than enough time to notice and set me wondering about one or two, well three actually, discordant notes.
Do: The Shekou line advertising is playing to the cultural Nantou theme. Those who know a bit about Shenzhen’s history, know that Nantou is the oldest city in the area, having been a salt yamen 1,000 years or so ago.Know that there was (and still is) a small temple to those Gods that bless Cantonese Opera singers. Moreover, Reform began in Shekou and the first Chinese themeparks (strictly speaking) were built in OCT, Nanshan; Shenzhen University is also here. So, the Shenzhen Subway company has illustrated these themes from Nantou’s cultural history. Wanxia, for example, is morning tea and Dongjiaotou has a Cantonese singer. An image of Nvwa illustrates Shekou’s importance in Reform and Opening; Windows of the World is the Eiffel Tower.
Alas, those who know this history also realize that this historical trail ran along “old street” from the west gate of Jiujie to Shekou. They also know that know that there was no direct path (except a mountain trail over Nanshan Mountain or on a boat around the peninsula tip) from Shekou to Chiwan. However, the Shekou Subway rewriting of this cultural history is on the order of land reclamation and, in fact, the subway does not connect Shekou to Nantou, but instead at Houhai (and more about Houhai below) turns east, heading through Science and Technology Park South though Mangrove Park to Windows of the World. Thus, the Subway Station History of Nantou appropriates and displaces the cultural ecology of the area. Wanxia, for example, is a local village and yes, you can have morning tea there, but Dongjiaotou was a riparian port, where trade goods from Zhongshan and other parts of the Delta were shipped to and from Nantou. Today, Dongjiaotou is the site of The Peninsula Estates, high end real estate development that winds around a genuinely old and decaying, already being “reclaimed” part of Shekou.
Re: Within this postmodern rewriting of Nantou’s history, Houhai is now a subway station and no longer a sheltered backwater. I have commented upon the Shenzhen tendency to raze mountains and lychee orchards and then name malls and housing estates after the no longer extant land formation. Land reclamation naming practices follow apace. Not only only has Nantou’s cultural history been rewritten as a series of Subway Stations through what used to be Houhai Bay, but also that Bay is now just another subway stop.
More importantly, Nantou’s cultural history was a history of backwater fishing, oyster cultivation, and riparian trade between small, village owned docks. A two-step sequence of appropriation is at play. First, the actual socio-economic base of local history has been destroyed. The last oyster fishing folk were relocated in 2006. Thus, in order to live here, one needs to be part of the new economy, which includes real estate development and working in more abstract cultural industries such as academia and tourism. Second, local history is now being deployed to add “flavor” or “local interest” to rich outsiders who are inhabiting Shenzhen. And real estate promoters can get away with this because most of those moving into Nantou don’t know the history of the area.
Mi: I also noticed that on the “local street map” which hangs in our station, our housing estate is conspicuously absent. There still remains much construction behind us, although I suspect that come Universiade, our own Europe [Shopping Mall for those living in Dubai style condos] will open. Here’s the point: with the opening of the Shekou Subway our housing estate is now part of the historic backwater. And as those of us who have watched the development of Nantou know, the purpose of backwater has been to reclaim it for ever-higher end development. Once all the reclaimed land has been filled in, our short walk to the Subway makes our housing development a prime target for upgrading and us for resettlement. Upside to looming displacement: we aren’t the only affordable housing development not on the map and maybe someone else will be targeted first. More upside: negotiations to raze a development usually take longer than the actual razing an old development and building a new development. We probably have several happy years ahead of us.
So yes, we are as settled as anyone in Shekou, where the landscape has been reshaped, cultural history is being rewritten, and the sands of prime real estate shift beneath our feet.
the world i want
Hung out around Seaworld for the first time in several months and yes, encountered new world order. The path from the Ming Hua to Nvwa now winds under an elevated road, which in turn winds around the new coastline toward the Peninsula housing estates. All this change is being promoted under the slogan “the world I want”, not that moi was asked. The planned changes are extensive, involving park space, high end consumption, and more mega-rises. I suspect all will be quite beautiful, albeit increasing exclusive, for the Universiade.
In vaguely related news (or, how ongoing property speculation might impact my life should we ever get around to buying a condo), I realized that given what we pay in rent, it would take us one year to buy one square meter of our current apartment. Given the size of my apartment, it would take over 90 years for us to buy it at current prices. However, property use rights in Shenzhen are for 70 years from when a building first went on the market. All this means that we would be dead and/or loose property rights before we ever got around to paying off our mortgage.
And we are not alone.
Housing in older parts of Shekou remains relatively cheap (under 20,000 per square meter) because it is inconveniently distant from the city. However, I also rode the new subway line from Yuehai station to Coastal City, which means faster, more reliable access to Shekou and ongoing land speculation. Moreover, housing within the Yucai school cache is as expensive as housing near Shenzhen Experimental and Shenzhen School, and for the same reason: only four schools in the city consistently get students into top high schools and then top universities.
Yes, yes, yes, Shenzhen is going to have to deal with the visceral disconnect between housing costs and salaries. So, here and here for speculation about why prices will continue to rise in 2011 despite the real call to control the housing market. Here for an English walk down memory lane when five years ago Zou Tao organized an internet boycott of Shenzhen’s then (already) too expensive housing. To get a sense of prices for new and second hand homes, today, visit aifang. Note that the “cheaper” homes are located in Baoan, Longgang, Dongguan and even Huizhou! And yes, subway construction continues apace.
shenzhener identity, reconsidered
This post about razed Shenzhen childhoods is inspired by an ongoing conversations with Melissa and several other post-80 young women (80后女性).
Melissa came to Shekou in the early 80s, attending elementary and middle school before going abroad. As I have indicated in other posts, Old Shekou and Old Shenzheners were different. Melissa was part of the Old Shekou group, those who came with China Merchants to establish the Shekou Industrial Zone between the years 1978 to 1988 (the year of the Shekou Tempest). In contrast, “Old Shenzheners” were those who came to build Shenzhen in the early 80s, when “Shenzhen” referred to the area from the Dongmen commercial area to the Shanghai hotel (at the western border of Huaqiangbei).
To paraphrase Gregory Bateson, the differences between an Old Shekou family and an Old Shenzhen were differences that have made for different lives. Melissa’s story is that of growing up with the Shekou spirit, which was progressive and liberal. I have written much about Shekou because Old Shekou people hoped to build a new society and it was, if anywhere in was in Shenzhen, Utopian. In contrast, Old Shenzhen (especially through Liang Xiang) has been more explicitly associated with the rise of the city’s explicitly materialist cultural.
Nevertheless, despite the opposing ideological significance of 80s Shekou and Shenzhen, I’ve spoken to several young post 80s women with similar life histories – came with parents to Shenzhen / Shekou in the 1980s, read books in parks, went for walks along the beach, enjoyed the city’s clean environment and small population, and did a lot of studying in high school before leaving for college (either abroad or Beijing/Shanghai/Guangzhou).
Interestingly, all speak of the same 近乡情怯 experience, which seems to have started as an inarticulate feeling toward the end of the 1990s and has grown into an expressed and discussed sentiment in the new millennium. The Shekou / Shenzhen that they remember are very different from the contemporary city. Shekou in particular has become a vexed symbol of past dreams. Today, Shekou is relatively backward, but more importantly has been absorbed into the surging mass of urban Shenzhen. At the same time, the city’s parks are smaller and more exotic (how many imported palm trees does one city need?), the skies are grayer, and the streets are now considered unruly enough that families don’t feel comfortable allowing middle school daughters to wander off by themselves. In other words, these post 80s women, whether they still live in Shenzhen or elsewhere, speak of a growing alienation from the city.
Ironically, their’s is precisely the generation that many once predicted as who would be true “Shenzheners” – people who identified with the city, rather than with their hometowns. People who would have an unproblematic relationship to Shenzhen as their “hometown”. This was in fact the generation for whom the city was built. Continue reading
Book Club Blues
On December 26, Mao’s birthday, our book club gathered to discuss a recent translation of Wang Shaoguang’s The Failure of Charisma: The Cultural Revolution in Wuhan (1995 Hong Kong University Press; translated in 2009: 王绍光 超凡领袖的挫败–文化大革命在武汉 the 80’s.). We were of several generations – the late 1950’s, 60’s, a couple from the 70’s, and a few from the 80’s.Liu Jingwen, member of the 80’s cohort led and organized the discussion.
What was striking about the conversation was the extent to which generational experience continued to dominate the conversation not just because 50’s and 60’s participants could claim personal experience of the Cultural Revolution, but also because of the relative value of political ideology amongst the different cohorts. Crudely speaking, the older the participant, the stronger was the conviction that collective politics is a pressing matter. Likewise, the younger the participant, the more likely s/he was to express surprise/ interest in/ confusion about the older generation’s valuation of politics.
How and why the Cultural Revolution continues to matter in Shenzhen are pressing questions because Shenzhen was (arguable) the last of the great social experiments from the first thirty years of the People’s Republic. Deng Xiaoping mobilized intellectuals, cadres, and the engineering corps to leave their cities and “cut open a road of blood (杀出一条血路)” or “feel your way across the river (莫这石头渡河),” depending on the relative militarism of one’s ideological commitments – and yes, Deng was militaristic, but it was also a society saturated by martial metaphors. [Deng Xiaoping’s road of blood inevitably makes me wonder, ‘whose blood’ and ‘how much is needed’?]
Importantly, both the road of blood and the river crossed convey the idea of movement – road to where? Crossing which river? Of course in Shenzhen circa 1978, these questions have concrete answers – roads to Hong Kong at Wenjindu and Luohu and a ferry to Hong Kong at Shekou, respectively. But the also entailed hope and an orientation to the future – a new kind of modernity and xiaokang for every Chinese citizen. In other words, the values that infused the establishment of Shenzhen were the values espoused by many during the Cultural Revolution. This connection is even clearer when we take into account the extent to which freedom and proceedural justice were fundamental to the establishment and prominance of Shekou during the 1980s.
What came out of our conversation was how much history has been disappeared not only in terms of relative knowledge, but also in terms of the scope of the debate. Throughout the discussion, I was struck by the similarity of the debate to American debates about Vietnam. Most of us don’t know enough to do more than debate the relative value of soundbites, rather than analyze and evaluate events and consequences. Moreover, instead of figuring out shared principals on which to base our analyses and evaluations, we end up comparing levels of personal experience – an important part of historical recovery and recognition of ignored lives, but insufficient to the task of building bridges if (and when) experience (or its lack) become the terms for inclusion in the discussion.
I came to two conclusions after three hours of debate: (1) we need an education that will enable us to transform ourselves and future generations into people who can contribute intelligently AND compassionately to social debate and action and (2) we need to get beyond complacent acceptance of business as usual, let alone celebrating Shenzhen’s successful establishment of hypercapitalism. As we left the coffee shop, one of the 50’s participants said to me, “And we still haven’t done anything in Shenzhen (深圳还没动手!)” Perpetual revolution, indeed.
Shekou Tempest Updates
Twenty years after the Shekou Tempest, reporters interviewed the two protagonists, Li Yanjie (李燕杰) and Zeng Xianbin (曾宪斌). In retrospect, it seems clear that the two were already walking different roads, which headed to two different versions of contemporary Chinese society, one neo-traditional and the other neo-liberal, both with a nationalist twist.
Li Yanjie continued and deepened his neo-traditional ethical teaching and, over the past ten years has re-emerged as a cultural critic. On his blog, he occassionaly contemplates the meaning of life in highly poetic prose that receives enthusiastic accolades from his readers.
For young people, love is a sweet word. From ancient times to the present, how many people have added to its beautiful colors and poetic imaginary! In those beautifully moving romantic poems, we can frequently feel the noble and healthy way that our Chinese people love.爱情，对于青年人来说，是一个甜蜜的字眼。古往今来，曾有多少人赋予她以美的色彩、诗的意境啊！在那些优美感人的爱情诗歌里，我们常常可以感受到我们中华民族高尚、健康的爱情格调。
Ormosia blooms in the south, but who knows how many branches this year?
Please pick several, as ormosia most symbolizes love.
红豆生南国，春来发几枝，愿君多采撷，此物最相思。
After a few more examples of romantic poetry, Li Yan Jie continues:
But how many young people today don’t know anything about this. After watching a few foreign films, they intentionally imitate those scenes of embracing and kissing, and some even are like this in public during broad daylight. 可是，现在有些青年人却不知道。看了几部外国故事片，就专门模仿那些拥抱、接吻的镜头，有的人大白天在公共场所也这样。
And then he concludes:
To maintain the purity of love, we need lofty ideals of love and to pay attention to romantic civilization. 爱情的格调要高，还得注意恋爱文明，要保持爱情的纯洁性。
Complete post, here.
Zeng Xianbin’s neo-liberal ethics blossomed into a career as a real estate development planner and professor at the Qinghua University Professional Management Training Center ( 清华大学职业经理人培训中心). I have been unable to find a blog under his name, but that may be because he sells video-cds of his lectures, and they aren’t cheap.
What is interesting is that Zeng Xianbin transformed his career as a journalist into that of a lecturer, much like Li Yanjie. And, like Li Yanjie, Zeng Xianbin has focused on living in the new era. However, unlike Li Yanjie, Zeng Xianbin has understood each of these changes to be an opportunity and pursued them as such. Indeed, his first opportunity was his comments on and understanding of how Shenzhen reformed public housing by gradually eliminating subsidized housing in favor of a housing market. He now provides ideas for how to use the market to provide suitable housing for low and middle income families.
Even more interestingly is that both men have shifted their ethical focus away from society and placed it firmly on the individual. Ethics has become self-expression, which may be more properly be understood as a kind of self-control (自治能力), whether in the pursuit of love or money. Which returns me to much earlier thoughts on Confucian businessmen or 儒商。
the shekou storm – translation
Throughout the 1980s, Beijing and Shenzhen were symbols in and locations of debates about the development of post-Mao society. In many ways, Beijing symbolized and produced theories of reform and opening, while Shenzhen symbolized and actualized these theories. However, as the saying goes, plans can’t keep up with change. Roughly a year and a half before the demonstrations in Tian’anmen, the Shekou Tempest demonstrated that the government was serious in its intention to reform and open all of society, including politics as usual.
In tribute to the efforts of young people in both cities, and the sincerity of the questioning, I have translated “Questions and Answers about the Shekou Tempest (蛇口风波问答录) by Zeng Xianbin (曾宪斌) because the article reminds us how important Shenzhen was (Shekou especially) to the hopes and dreams that characterized Chinese youth during the 1980s. The article also illustrates at what cost Shenzhen’s post Southern Tour (1992) development has come; once upon a time, Shenzhen residents had the rhetorical skills and ethical compulsion to debate the social implications of going capitalist.
Ironically, many of the early Shekou gold diggers, who once believed it was possible to make money and contribute to society, now sould like old leftists – too many people have come to Shenzhen only to make money without contributing anything to society. This emphasis on working for society, rather than oneself seems to be the important thread that links Old Shenzhen to the Chinese Revolution; New Shenzhen, post 1989 Shenzhen, is something else again.
Questions and Answers about the Shekou Tempest
by Zeng Xianbin
Reporter’s note: This is a small debate that took place half a year ago and was later reported in several newspapers. Today this newspaper [People’s Daily] introduces the event and some related opinions, as well as providing space for more comerades to participate in the discussion, together exploring the question of youth political thought work.
On January 13 this year [1988], Shekou, Shenzhen organized a “Youth Education Experts and Shekou Youth Symposium”. Participants included Comerades Li Yanjie, Qu Xiao, and Peng Qiyi, three political lecturers from the Chinese Youth Thought Work Research Center and seventy Shekou youths. The media has already introduced this symposium. Even if evaluations of this discussion were mixed, nevertheless there was concensus about one point: its meaning exceeded the actual tempest itself. During the first and middle parts of July, this reporter split his time between Beijing and Shenzhen, interviewing people involved such as Li Yanjie, Qu Xiao, Peng Qingyi and Yuan Geng, asking them to answer questions about which readers are concerned. In order to insure that the reader gets objective, verifiable facts, this reporter has recorded only the questions and answers. The reader must judge the rights and wrongs of the case for herself. Continue reading
Shekou 30th anniversary
This year marks the 30th anniversary of the China Merchants (招商局) Shekou Industrial Zone (possibly park). Shekou was established one year before Shenzhen, which celebrates the city’s thirtieth next year or the following year, depending on whether one counts from the year Guangdong approved the decision to establish Shenzhen (1979), or the Central government (1980). The SEZ border with the rest of the country wasn’t fully in place until 1986… Anyway, all sorts of commemorative events have already begun, including randomly posted pictures of Old Shenzhen, here, here and here, which are worth checking out to get a sense of the scale of change.
(Although the first set are actually from the 25th anniversary. I really do have to write about the ongoing and seemingly compulsive revisions of Shenzhen history. In a city that is constantly referred to as having no history, the historic compulsion is not only alive and well, it also shows up in advertising as “11 years of experience” as if 11 years was a long time, and of course, it is, but only in the context of thirty years, which are considered nothing in the history of 5,000 years of civilization… contradictions, contradictions…)
One of the more famous pictures from the early years is of Deng Xiaoping writing the characters for Seaworld (海上世界), here. His daughter stands to his right and, looking over his shoulder is Yuan Geng, the man who initiated many of the reforms that are today considered central to reform and opening, including: the first industrial park open to foreign investment, directly hiring and firing employees (rather than using centralized work assignments), and introducing market driven management principles (time is money, efficiency is life.
This picture is interesting for what it tells us about the political culture in which Shekou came into being as well as the kind of political and social change that Shekou once symbolized.
1. 1984 was the first time that Deng Xiaoping came to Shenzhen. He visited many places, but the two symbolically most important were Guomao (in Luohu, near the train station) and the Minghua cruise ship in Shekou. He inscribed characters for both the Shenzhen and Shekou governments. Shenzhen received the famous lines: 深圳的发展和经验证明，我们建立经济特区的政策是正确的 (the development and experience of shenzhen proves that the policy to establish an economic special zone was correct, picture of Deng Xiaoping writing inscription.) In contrast, Shekou received four characters: 海上世界 (seaworld).
2. The actual content of the inscriptions points to the differences between the early eighties Shenzhen and Shekou models of reform. Shenzhen was explicitly linked with politics. This is confirmed by the importance of Guomao, which was built as both a shopping center and an office building to house representatives from Chinese provinces, cities, and ministries. In contrast, Shekou was explicitly linked re-orienting everyday life from models of third world mutual support and mass production to capitalist trade and individualized consumption as a brief history of the Minghua and the four characters “Seaworld” shows.
The Minghua was a French cruise ship christened by DeGalle (1962). The Chinese bought it to transport engineering support to Tanzania in 1973 to build railroad in support of villigization—a form of African socialism based on the Chinese model. In 1979, then used as part of relinking Sino-Japanese relations. In 1983, the Minghua was moved to Shekou and refurnished as a floating restaurant and nightclub, where it anchored a westernized club scene.
3. When Deng Xiaoping inscribed the characters for Seaworld, he not only signaled his support of the Shekou model, he made the kinds of reforms that were taking place in Shekou a model for national development. Chinese leaders inscribe (题词) calligraphy to support organizations and policies. As of 1984, reform and opening did not only refer to administrative reorganization (as signaled by the Shenzhen inscription), but also to social and cultural reform. This is important because before 6.4 individual desires and political reform had not yet been brutally separated, so that in pursuing their dreams, young people in Shenzhen also represented a new kind of Chinese future.
4. The fascinating and ongoing politics of the smiling face. Smiling continues to be, like inscribing phrases and words, a way that Chinese leaders publicly express political support. This picture of happy leaders was a metonym for reform society: following this path will lead to a happy future. It ties into traditional paternalism, in which strict fathers only smiled when their children truly did something well.
Shenzhen Noted 
