the ostriches came to shenzhen by way of the united states, “where,” the farm manager told me, “american scientists spent over twenty years experimenting in order to breed an ostrich that could live out of africa.”
Tag Archives: shenzhen identity
南山区作协：on literary production
yesterday yang qian and i participated in the second nanshan district writers federation council meeting on literary creativity. yang qian was made a council member and i was made an honorary council member.
artistic federations are quasi-governmental organizations that promote the arts. just recently, for example, when fat bird invited the theatre practice to shenzhen, it was the nanshan district united artists federation (文联) that sponsored the event. federation members assume that a good working relationship between the government and artists is necessary to establish a creative environment. moreover, members assume that the arts are necessary for various reasons. one is to civilize society. another is to educate the public. yet another is to bridge the differences that separate different groups of people. these tasks are regulated by the bureau of dissemination (or propaganda, depending on your dictionary’s understanding of 宣传部). altogether, nanshan has 8 arts federations (戏剧 theatre、影视 broadcast、舞蹈 dance、音乐 music、曲艺 traditional stage arts、摄影 photography、书法 caligraphy、美术 fine arts), which are administratively under the united artists federation（文联), a government department in the ministry of dissemination/propaganda. zhang ruoxue (张若雪) heads the nanshan district united artists federation.
established in 1997, the writers federation specifically supports the development of writing (fiction and non-fiction) in nanshan. federation members come from both government and non-government institutions. several members are independent artists. the chairman of the writers federation, nan xiang (南翔) teaches in the shenzhen university department of chinese, while the secretary (秘书长) is zhang ruoxue, head of the united artists federation. perhaps unexpectedly to westerners accustomed to thinking of social conflict in terms of government and anti-government groups, divisions within the nanshan writers federation (at this meeting at least) did not fall along an official-unoffical axis. instead, the contradiction between high and popular forms of literature was the most salient axis of difference.
nan xiang, for example, gave a long talk on how chinese writers should pay attention to the chinese writer communities outside of the mainland. he also encouraged nanshan writers to pay attention to those foreign writers being celebrated abroad. in this way, nanshan writers could begin to interact with a larger world. ding li (丁力), however, took a strong stance in favor of writing from local experience for local audiences. indeed as each writer spoke about their current projects it became clear that their were two primary kinds of writers, with different funding sources an intended audiences. these groups were metaphorically characterized as the temple (庙堂) and the river and lakes (江湖) writers. “river and lakes” refers to the unofficial worlds of bandits and travelling performers. crudely, the temple writers wrote for an elite audience, including foreigners and looked to the government and (international) agencies for funding to produce high art. in contrast, the river and lakes writers wrote for the mass of chinese readers and looked to the market to support themselves. in this sense, elite artists positioned themselves as more dependent on the government than did the mass artists. during the meeting, elite audiences were more sensative to ideological constraints, while the mass artists tended to celebrate the market as an index of literary value.
a third group, women writers were the palatable absence in all this conversation. outnumbered in representation, they also spoke less than the other council members. indeed, their silence posed the question about multiple fractions within the group, or differences that have yet to be articulated. likewise, the difference between literary criticism and literary production was glossed in conversation. it may be, however, that as china’s economy continues to become polarized between haves and have-nots other social differences seem less important.
below i provide links to sites by or about some of the writers who attended the meeting.
independent writer 丁力 writes about 8 to 10 books a year on his shenzhen experiences. this site is from his “ding li commercial books series”;
shenzhen university professor 钱超英 has written on the new chinese language movement among overseas chinese in australia;
nanshan policeman 肖双红 also writes about his shenzhen experiences;
middle school teacher 严凌君 reports from shenzhen. he also organizes a website for young writers;
independent writer 谢宏 has his own blog;
shenzhen university associate professor of chinese 汤奇云 critiques the relationship between aesthetics and social position in 王晓华’s《西方生命美学局限研究》;
government official and telenovela script writer 张友高 talks about developing characters;
shenzhen university associate professor, 谢晓霞 critiques magazine articles before reform;
haiwang enterprises executive, 吴迪 has written a fictional account of the student soldiers (学生军) who helped build the third line of defence during the cultural revolution;
independent writer, 王十月 blogs about art;
shenzhen university assistant professor, 曹清华 has uploaded his academic papers.
开学了！
first flag raising ceremony, 2006-07 school year
by law, chinese children are guaranteed nine years of education, which is divided into two parts: primary (小学 grades 1-6) and middle (初中 grades 7-9, but called in chinese middle 1, middle 2 and middle 3). in practice, however, many children don’t receive an elementary school education, let alone a middle school education. by law, the obligatory education (义务教育) that each student receives should be equal. in practice, however, even within the same school, students often receive very different educations. things become even stickier at the high school level, where the state is no longer required to educate all students, even though a high school education is a prerequisite for taking the college entrance examination.
the other day, i met with other educators to discuss the problem of education equality in shenzhen. they presented two reasons for the discrepancy between the law and its implementation.
first, each municipality or county is responsible for the education of all children with household registration in their district. this means that children with beijing household registration have the right to go to public education in beijing, while children with a rural anhui registration can go to school in a village school. should a child be moved from the place of household registration to another locality, that child does not have the right to public education in the new locality. at this point, parents have a choice. they can either send their child to school back to the place where they have household registration and thereby take advantage of the public education system; they can pay extra fees to send their child to school where they are living, or they can pay more money to send their child to a private school. consequently, poor children, who have moved with their parents often do not go to school because their parents cannot afford the fees.
in shenzhen, the problem of educating children without household registration is particularly acute because most inhabitants aren’t legally shenzhen residents. moreover, roughly two-thirds of the city’s estimated 13 million come from the countryside and cannot afford to pay extra fees at either public or private schools. consequently, there are squatter schools (棚户学校) located throughout the city, where poor children are schooled. these schools are underfunded. moreover, they usually only provide for an elementary education. many children must return to their hometowns in order to go to middle school.
second, the point of education remains high scores on the college entrance exam. high schools are ranked by the percentage of graduates who go to college, as well as the percentage that test into the best colleges. in turn, middle schools are ranked by the percentage of students that test into the best high schools; likewise, elementary schools are ranked by the percentage of students who test into the best middle schools. in order to cultivate students who can achieve the necessary scores to test into top schools at the next level, many chinese schools have what are known as “important homerooms (重点班)”. the best teachers in the school are assigned to these homerooms. students are placed in these homerooms based on test scores. mid-terms and finals determine ranking and students are moved from or into an important homeroom after test results are posted.
in shenzhen, for example, an elementary school many have six sixth grade homerooms, two of which would be important homerooms. the students in those homerooms would get the best teachers, the best materials, and the most opportunities to participate in school activities in order to prepare them to do well on middle school entrance exams. students in the other four homerooms would also take the middle school entrance exams, but without the extra preparation given to students in the important homerooms. this filtering process continues through each examination level. in fact, these exams are so competitive, that at the middle and high school level, it is not uncommon for schools to stop offering gym, art, music, and other untested subjects to students. by the end of their senior year in high school, students are only doing test preparation.
this fall, the shenzhen government will be holding meetings to discuss what can be done to make education more equal within the municipality. however, as educators pointed out, until the municipality takes responsibility for students without shenzhen household residence or eliminates the practice of important homerooms, inequality will continue to define educational opportunities in shenzhen. what’s more, they said, until the college education system changes, officials, educators, and parents will continue seek every possible advantage for their students and children, that is, perpetuating rather than ameliorating the inequalities.
the school i work at has a primary and middle school division; we are currently applying for accreditation of a high school division.
大芬村: when is a copy not a forgery?
located in buji town, dafen village is (in)famous for the assembly line production of copies of famous works of art, usually western masters. dafen artists pride themselves on making authentic copies, giving attention brush struck, style, and feeling. all for as little as US$ 10.
i have visited dafen village several times this summer and have yet to persuade myself to buy a souvenir painting. not that i need to. i already have a dafen souvenir, which a friend gave me after her hong kong shop went under. (she tried to cash in on the hong kong passion for interior make-overs by selling dafen copies in hong kong.) as it stands, my reluctance to purchase a dafen painting intrigues me. after all, living in shenzhen i regularly buy pirated dvds and cds; i also buy “improved upon” copies at luohu mall at the hong kong-shenzhen border. my l.v. billfold, for example, has giant flower smiley faces, which i haven’t seen on any authentic l.v. i wear knock-offs when i can’t find what i’m looking for in outlets. moreover, i live in a housing development that looks like housing developments all over the city; my apartment is itself a reproducible unit in a mass produced building. and even on superficial reflection, i remember buying posters of great works of art to hang on my college dorm wall.
the only other area of my life as a consumer, where i seem as resolutely committed to originality seems culinary. yet here again, the question is not so much one of whether or not a dish can be reproduced (after all the sign of a top chef is the ability to reproduce the same taste day in and out), but rather one of freshness; i enjoy fresh vegetables, unfrozen meets, and innovative tastes. i want the same on my walls. or so i tell myself as i look at the mass produced spring festival couplet i have hung on my door (年年如意新春乐；岁岁平安合家欢) with glittered chicken.
my reluctance to purchase a copy found its counterpart in the pictures i took while there; i again found myself looking sideways at what was happening. i ended up photographing an unintentional street performance. however, yu haibo of the shenzhen economic daily won at the 2006 world press press photo of the year contest for his photos of dafen village. eastsouthwestnorth provides a translation of 天方乱谭‘s analysis of yu’s photos and how representative they are of china.
those interested in purchasing a dafen oil painting can order directly from various websites (dafen village dot com and dafen dot net). the people’s daily provides a brief history of dafen.
莲花山：lianhua mountain park
with friends, i climbed to the top of lianhua mountain park, where deng xiaoping strides purposely into the future.
well, perhaps not toward the future. he is afterall standing in place. nevertheless it is fair to say that because the land beneath him continues to shift, he’s no longer where he started. deng now both overlooks and synthesizes the meaning of the environmentally conscious central axis, as well as the ever more expensive real estate of futian, including huaqiangbei, the rainbow glass buildings of the financial district, the huanggang checkpoint, and numerous gated communities.
it’s hard to know if this exactly is what he intendend when he approved the construction of shenzhen. it’s pretty obvious, however, that this is what current leaders say he meant. accordingly, lianhua park commermorates deng’s 1984 southern tour, when he proclaimed that shenzhen demonstrated the correctness of reform and opening. the next political step, of course, was not toward city hall, but toward the fourteen coastal cities, which began learning from shenzhen. importantly, the practices associated with learning (学习) in china include emulation. so that “learning from shenzhen (学习深圳)” directed leaders in other chinese cities to do what shenzhen had done: dismantle work units, bring in foreign capital, set up labor and housing markets, and build an international city.
sweating in the heat and humidity, we climbed past a kite flying field through the remnants of a lychee orchard and into a palm tree grove to arrive at deng’s monument. there, banyan trees and unbrellas protected most visitors from the sun, while a few others posed in front of deng and the engraved mural of deng xiaoping’s words, “the development and experiences of Shenzhen have proved the correctness of our policy on the establishment of special economic zones (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).” deng wrote and presented this inscription on January 26, 1984. at the pinnacle, the decision feels correct. it saturates my senses and suddenly the park, the views, and the easy pleasures of kite flying justify deepening reform. “everyone should have a nice park,” i think unreflexively.
as an early reform joke had it: deng xiaoping comes to a fork in the road. his driver asks, “what should we do.” deng answers, “signal left (toward socialism), but turn right (toward capitalism).”
and that’s the rub. i don’t know how seriously people take the deng statue and plaque, which celebrate a rather banal political message: brought to you by deng xiaoping and the ccp, reform and opening good! instead i worry that propaganda may be as sweet as an afternoon in the park. for the curious, a people’s daily article on the 1992 southern tour sketches the ideological importance of the 1984 southern tour with politically correct reverence.
summer fun
the other day, yang qian and i walked from tianmian to the zhongxin plaza. we covered roughly two kilometres in slightly over one hour, stopping along the way to look at the memorial to sars heroes (lots of high-tech medical research and caring nurses), pose in front of bus stop advertisements (in this sense, irresistable), and check out what was happening curbside (an octopus floated in a tank and a man repaired a bicycle). we then stepped quickly past the women, who were using peddle sewing machines, like my grandmother used to use and my mother inherited to alter clothing, right there in the middle of our playground. and there’s the rub. shenzhen hasn’t zoned inequalityout of sight and mind, except during politically sensitive moments, when the poor are swept away. normally, the poor push back, crowding even those of us who like to think ourselves concerned. and we are concerned. just not all the time. just not that hot saturday afternoon when we wanted to play. so we put the camera away and ducked into an air-conditioned coffee shop, where our summer fun ended with a math lesson: one cup of coffee = hemming five pairs of jeans; one smoothie = six; a piece of cheesecake and one of walnut = five again. priceless.
shadow people
i’ve been thinking about shadow people.
when the sun shines in shenzhen, it blasts through the city, and those who can take refuge in air-conditioned offices, malls, teashops, houses. those who have no air-conditioned refuge, sit in the shadows of trees and buildings. as i walk through the city, my camera searching for symbols, i often overlook them. and yet. they nevertheless people my walks through shenzhen–looking at me, looking away, resting. when our eyes meet, i turn away, ashamed to take the picture. their skin is usually deeply tanned, black, too black, as a hua, the woman who gives me a weekly facial says.
i freckle in the sun. accordingly parts of my body that don’t get regular sun time, are pale, fishbelly white, as my brothers used to tease. a hua likes my fishbelly. she sighs and says wistfully how great i would look if i could just stay out of the sun. i remind her that after forty odd years of walking outside without an umbrella, odds are most of my freckles won’t fade. she sighs again. what a waste.
the shadow people work odds and ends jobs: collecting and sorting trash, pulling carts of discarded electronic products to the second hand market. i come across older women sitting against the wall of an underground passageway, waving a hat to cool themselves. many bike to and from these odd jobs, spending the day and much of the night in the streets, unprotected from the sun except for the shaded edges of the city. even wearing hats, long-sleeved shirts, and slacks they have been roasted dark, well done. ugly, a hua says, comparing her caramel colored arm to my fishbelly.
squint and you may see them.
华强北：constructing progress
located in futian district, 华强路 (huaqiang road) is the name of the central axis of the area known as huaqiang north. the area itself is bordered by yannan road (east) to huafu road (west), and hongli road (north) to shennan road (south). importantly, the southern border of shennan road with its strip of postmodern glass and steel buildings is often included in the area. with dongmen, huaqiangbei is one of the two most important commercial areas in the city. it has an area of roughly 1.45 square kms and according to futian government online, as of april 25, 2006 boasts over 700 shops, averages 500,000 visiters per day, and generates 26 billion net sales rmb per year. catic, the chinese aviation bureau and major huaqiangbei investor has uploaded a flash picture of the huaqiangbei skyline (looking east) to celebrate the area’s economic vitality. and the commercial interests in huaqiangbei have opened their own webpage.
we have come to a reader be warned moment: telling this history frustrates me because i end up feeling like i understand the general process, but have missed all the details. the problem of course is that i suspect the story is to be found precisely in those lost details. indeed, i don’t know if the details can be known. in part, my doubt springs from the lack of reliable books and information on the web. the early years of shenzhen simply weren’t systematically documented. in 1995, i went to the city’s 15th anniversary exhibition at the shenzhen museum, but it was a celebration of the present, rather than an investigation into the past.
moreover, with all the different governments moving from one building to another (part of the huaqiangbei story below), stuff got misplaced. i once tried to gather pictures and documents from the 80s, but was told either the pictures weren’t taken or the papers lost in a move. the thing is, i don’t believe i was simply being kept at bay to protect state secrets. what got boxed and moved is around here somewhere, but… i understand. i too have lost papers and documents in moves from one office to the next. i also believe my interlocutors when the tell me that in the early 80s there wasn’t time to take pictures; they worked long hours and moved from one job to the next. also, its sometimes hard to remember that over 25 years ago, there weren’t all that many personal cameras in shenzhen, and so people tended to take pictures of people and places that mattered to them.
i doubt the availability of relevant details because (given the lack of documentation) they can only have been carried in the hearts and minds of the people who were actually there. even allowing for the instability of human consciousness, these events are scattered accross the population, rather than located in one neat spot. so, no matter how many people i talk to, i feel i’ve missed something.
i also feel outside the historical loop because the process itself remains counter-intuitive to me, in the way that football does. so even when i do meet up with someone who can tell the story, i’m not always sure what to ask or, more importantly, how to ask it. now, i have chinese friends who can memorize levels of government and rankings as easily as my brother remembers footbal statistics. in fact, not a few have patiently gone through the system with me, two of them several times. but still i need to lay things out and look at organizational charts before i understand what i’ve been told and then i find myself feeling about it the same way i feel about my brother’s statistics. i realize it matters to him, i appreciate the time and effort that went into cultivating that kind of knowledge, i even understand why someone would want to have that kind of knowledge easily available in any conversation. but, political ranking isn’t my game.
all this to say, i realize this history is important. i’m trying to figure out why the space itself fascinates me, but the history doesn’t. it may be that i’m interested in a different kind of history, smaller, more persoanl and intimate. it may also be that at the level of generalities, i’ve heard this story all too many times. i once heard a reknown sinologist say that research was boring because marx had already outlined the process; been here, done that. at the time, i was outraged. how can it be the same? how can people’s lives be boring? but i have come to hear that comment as a comment on the limits of knowledge. we do reduce everything to generalities, and then are surprised when we don’t find anything new. so if i could find another way to approach urban rankings it might fascinate me.
by shenzhen standards, huaqiang north is an old area. and, like most of the city did not start out as either a commercial area or an administrative unit within a district government. indeed, the history of huaqiang north not only anticipates many of the transformations happening in other parts of the city, but also illustrates the neo-liberal vision of progress: through hard work the people have moved from working in factories through owning commercial properties toward wheeling and deeling in international finance. what’s more, this vision is not simply futian district’s plan for the huaqiang north area, but rather a scaled-down version of the overall plan for shenzhen, which has called to transform the economic base manufacturing to higher value-added production in real estate and financial services. the critical point, which is glossed over in the neoliberal account, is that those working and those benefiting aren’t always the same people. economic growth and expansion hasn’t meant that every shenzhen immigrant has worked their way out and up of relative poverty; many factory workers are still factory workers; many factory owners are now stock brokers.
also, like other places in shenzhen, the history of the area has resulted from complex negotiations between different interests, none of which fall into neat categories. a brief history of those interests:
when the central government first elevated baoan county to shenzhen city in 1980, it did not immediately redristrict the lower levels of government. this meant that although shenzhen city now existed, it was placed on top of a rural administrative apparatus. in an ordinary chinese city, administrative levels are: city (市), district(区), street(街道办事处), and neighborhood(居委会). at the time shenzhen replaced baoan county(县), but beneath it were communes (公社), large and small brigades (大小队). the large and small brigades corresponded to administrative and natural villages (行政村、自然村), respectively.
crudely, one of the main purposes of the new city government was to transform rural administrative structures into urban structures. in previous entries, i have focused on the structural position of the new villages within shenzhen, in this entry, i want to look at the new urban structures which replaced the villages. what is interesting is to keep in mind the dissolving and restructuring of economic units within the government. specifically, although shenzhen has been heralded as a place where state-owned industries constitute a small percentage of actual businesses, it remains the case that the most lucrative businesses are linked to the government either directly or indirectly.
the earliest shenzhen plan was approved in 1982. in it, shekou was set up as an independent industrial zone (another fascinating history of 1980 experimentation). in what would become downtown, the plan identified about 50 square kms, stretching from the wenjindu border crossing in the east to huafu road in the west. within this area, land was appropriated by urban work units that were then responsible to develop the area according to the plan. the area that is now know as huaqiangbei was originally part of the shangbu industrial area.
the organizations that came included the former national electronics ministry (电子工业部), the weapons ministry (兵器部), the national bureau of aviation (航空局), and the guangdong provincial bureau of electronics (广东省电子局). each was given the authority to negotiate for a tract of land on which to construct electronics factories. of course, this included putting in the infrastructure necessary to run this factories. nevertheless, the project took off and by 1986, the shenzhen municipal and guangdong provincial governments brought these companies together to form the shenzhen electronics company, which was named saige electronics (赛格电子集团)in 1988.
a bird’s eye of huaqiang north bears traces of this history, where the tracts of factory buildings stretch across the landscape:
first attempt to restructure the area was in 1998, when the municipal government invested 45 million rmb in infrastructure for huaqiang road to build better sidewalks, install better street lighting, a large screen, more electrical wires, and benches for resting under imported palm trees. these investments transformed huaqiang road into a pedestrian friendly strip of large malls. according to the above mentioned futian government online statistics the government’s investment stimulated 1.2 billion rmb commercial investment in the larger area.
团聚：out and up
the u.p. went global and caught me unawares.
i open this story with a picture of me and my cousin david. this post resonates with a previous entry about tianmian. there i tracked the relationships that placed me in shenzhen in a particular way. here i sketch the geneology that specifies me as american. both entries share an impulse to transform discomfort about the relative privileges i enjoy into ethnographic knowledge. this discomfort, whether voiced or not vexes my work to date. i hope that narrating these awkward moments will illustrate the complexity of documenting shenzhen.
about a week ago, my uncle emailed me to say that my cousin david would be in china and wouldn’t it be great if the two of us could meet up. surprise. my mother is from iron mountain, in the u.p., where i used to spend summer vacations. my siblings and i swam, ran around, hung out with relatives, learned to play smear, argued with relatives, ate fresh vegetables from their gardens, had swordfights with sparklers on the fourth, and still had two more weeks to endure with relatives. i stopped going my sixteenth year because i was given the choice of going to michigan or staying home. so, my uncle’s email abruptly reminded me that not only do i have an extended family, but also that those folks are busy creating and participating in global networks. just like me. gulp.
david looks like my mother in ways that i don’t. surprise again. more importantly, his personal trajectory out of the u.p. makes him like my mother in ways that i am not. my mother and david embody connections between the rural midwest and upwardly mobile suburbanites. when we would go back to the u.p. all those summers, my mother was going home to people she recognized and who recognized her as being fundamentally the same: same small high school, same kinds of wage labor, same catholic church, same teachers, same cold winters, same rural environment. david went to that high school and church, his father and brother work(ed) those jobs, endured those winters… the difference from the u.p. relatives that my mother and david share is that they both got out by working their way up. and today’s story is in the prepositions. out and up: my mother through nursing and david by way of the marines.
in contrast, my siblings and i grew up in upper middle class suburbs, moving from house to more expensive house, with the expectation of a college education and yet bigger houses for our children. that all of us now live in smaller houses than when we were children is another story. at the moment, i’m thinking that when we went to the u.p. all those summers ago, my siblings and i embodied class and cultural differences that we weren’t capable of finessing, although there were times that affection and horseplay overcame the ruptures. it wasn’t simply that we symbolized my parents’ success (my father was also an out and up story from pittsburg), but also and more fundamentally it was that we lived in a world from which our cousins were excluded. we went to michigan; they didn’t come to new jersey. these differences became more painfully obvious with each passing year, until my simblings and i opted out of going back. and so, even if the reunion with david caught me offguard, that it would happen outside the u.p. might have been predicted.
we talked about what we and our immediate families have been up to these past twenty-odd years. most of his family remains in the u.p.; mine is scattered throughout different east coast suburbs. indeed, leaving jersey, especially for new york, is itself a fascinating story of the lived snobberies and upward mobilities of my siblings and friends. and yet… the snobberies and upward mobilities of my family and friends have been reproduced in shekou. local investors, travelling businessmen, and government officials bent on globalizing shenzhen have together reproduced places where middle class american suburbanites easily lunch and dine. david and i had dinner at gypsy’s one of the comfortable, seaworld (海上世界) restaurants that cater to displaced westerners in shekou. i like the food, which is fresh, eclectic, and yet so very, very familar; it tastes like good food from my hometown burb and provides the particular counterpoint to the generalized tastes of macdonald’s and papa john’s, which are also located in the seaworld plaza.
this meeting has started me re-thinking these fieldnotes.
on the question of a shenzhen identity: i am native to the idealized version of global culture that is being built in seaworld. this culture is not broadly u.s. american, but a vision of upper middle class suburban forms of consumption. developers and real estate agents market aspects of this vision to sell new houses (bigger and better, like the houses of my childhood); local officials judge the success of reform on the numbers of white collar workers who can afford to eat at restaurants like gypsy’s.
the different trajectories that brought my cousin and me to seaworld highlight the way that exporting this version of prosperity functions to restructure domestic american class relations in international terms. on the one hand, the seaworld version of prosperity has enabled me to find jobs and live comfortably in shenzhen. on the other hand, it has also provided opportunities for my cousin to move out of and up from the u.p. crudely but nevertheless provocatively seaworld helped ameliorate our previous antagonisms, which we still don’t talk about.
this leads to the question of who is excluded from this world; my relatives in the u.p. remain excluded from this world, although one or two may find a way in. david and my mother remain the embodied bridges between these worlds. at the same time, most of china’s rural poor are also excluded from this world. this is important, seaworld marks not an amelioration of the class differences that separated me from my u.p. relatives, but rather an extension of those differences into a new domain. i am not suggesting that chinese society wasn’t marked by class differences before reform. instead, i am reiterating a point long made by postcolonial marxists: displacing our class differences onto new societies has neither resolved class tensions in the u.s., nor improved class antagonisms in china. instead, class conflicts in both china and the u.s. have been amplified, even as the beneficiaries of this inequality justify their actions in terms of globalized meeting grounds, like seaworld, as places where cultural difference is overcome.
in local newspapers, the class difference manifest in the architecture and various uses of seaworld is glossed as “incentive”, presumably to move out of and up from the rural hinterland. formally, at least, the structure of the incentive reproduces the lived differences between rural and suburban americans. i am not sure whether or not my siblings and i inspired my cousin to join the marines and go to college; my gut reaction is that the comparison although annoying was less important than the physical and social unpleasantness of both manual labor and being denied what is considered valuable, including tasty food, an interesting education, and opportunities to travel. as chinese friends who are on their way out and up remind me: there really are better lives than they used to lead.
finally, i find myself wondering at the understandings, experiences, and practices that compel us individually to move out and up, rather than collectively forward.
旧村改新：initial observations
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).
Shenzhen Noted 