These past few days we’ve been “eating melons,”–the colloquial expression for watching other people’s drama. This time, its an internecine melodrama starring the Shuiwei and Huanggang Zhuangs.
wtf huanggang?
Tag Archives: shenzhen
where in shenzhen is mary ann odonnell?
Today, I’m in an English language reader for Chinese elementary and middle school students! I’m in the People Power section along with Zou Hongtao (who came to Shenzhen in 1979 with the Corps of Civil Engineering) and Frank Wang Tao (汪滔), the founder of DJI. It’s true, China’s Foreign Language and Teaching Press is putting out a series of graded readers for young students and I’m in the Shenzhen book, City of Miracles.
the cultural geography of xixiang
The number 1 subway line stops at Pingzhou (坪洲), which once upon a time was a sandbar near the coast of the Nantou Sea. The station is at the edge of Qianhai, but near the former center of restored Bao’an County. The county seat of restored Bao’an was Baocheng (Bao City)-Xixiang, with administrative functions in Bao City and commercial functions in Xixiang. Indeed, the layout of Bao City-Xixiang echoes the layout of Luohu-Shagbu, with a new town going up next to the older market town.
Continue readingpeeping
So the Nantou venue of the 2023 UABB finally opened on August 16. Rumor has it that the reconstruction of several handshakes was delayed. And delayed. And delayed. But. The results hover at the edge of critique, where showing is itself already taking a position, especially as what we can show and how it can be shown have been increasingly restricted. What I came away with was a sense of how windows function in tight, crowded spaces. We catch glimpses of our neighbors and strangers on their way, peeping across (necessary?) divides. Impressions of a walk through official biennale and adjacent spaces, below:
dongmen / laojie
If you’ve been studying Shenzhen, you know that some of the most widely circulated images of the city circa 1980 were taken by Leroy W. Demery, Jr just before the SEZ was approved. Demery uploaded the images to flickr, where they were picked up by historians in Shenzhen, including government exhibitions. In 2013, he recalled that trip in an Insider interview. He returned three years later, and although Demery didn’t leave the general area of the railway station, nevertheless he noted that it wasn’t the same city. Boom!
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huangbeiling
Yesterday, I walked Huangbeiling, which is located on the eastern section of Shennan Road. Before the construction of the subway system, Huangbeiling felt like the end of the accessible SEZ; there was more beyond, but getting there required a car or plans for a day trip. Today, Huangbeiling is a major transportation transit hub, linking the downtown area to the eastern coast.
Huangbeiling still feels like a golden era urban village, albeit recovering from Covid shutdowns. The layout of the village is against and up the Wutong Mountain Range, with enough nooks and crannies for unexpected encounters: a household temple to Guanyin, a mountain park with feral cats hanging out in tree branches, and good, relatively cheap food.
Sixteen years ago, one of the earliest Fat Bird guerrilla performances was held at the Huangbeiling pet market. Dogs and cats were just becoming fixtures–like cars and branded items–of the middle class Shenzhen lifestyle. Fat Bird “rented” a large dog cage for about five minutes before security guards and village leaders appeared and asked us to leave In the video of the post-performance interview you can also glimpse what this section of Shennan Road used to be like. After the performers were asked to leave, we jumped on a bus and went across the city to Chiwan. The short performance gives a sense of both the transformation of the area, as well as the relative openness of the city at the time compared to the present moment.
baishizhou, January 2023
Photos from Baishizhou, Dec 31, 2023. Three notes: 1, the Baishizhou mural has been replaced with a Shahe mural, suggesting that the area’s rebranding is proceeding apace; 2, the covid regulation infrastructure was solid and expensive, even though the area was already being demolished, and; 3, there are still holdouts in the village, most closer to Shennan Road, however, the center area near Jiangnan Department store, where 302 used to be is difficult to reach because mostly razed and inside the current construction site.
Impressions of the walk, below.
thinking about what it means that Shenzhen must needs be constantly renewed…
Yes, this is another happy collaboration with Jonathan Bach. Chapter from Neue Städte: Vom Project Der Moderne Our Authentisierung, ed. by Andreas Ludwig.
rhythms of the bug
Yesterday morning between midnight and noon, 4 positives were reported in Shenzhen. One each in Pingshan, Xiangmihu, Nanhu and Dongmen Street Offices. So basically in the east, but citywide rapid response: neighborhoods went into lockdown, emergency corona testing was mandatory in those those street offices, and everyone in the city was notified that all day Sunday, June 19 access to public transport and spaces would require a 24-hour QR code, or green horse. Government sponsored events, including a planned Handshake guided tour of Shatoujiao were cancelled. Blink. The information was delivered to our phones.
I took the above photo while waiting online to get tested. For the first time in several months, we waited over half an hour. Fortunately, it wasn’t raining. Sigh.
formalizing boundaries within the city
One of the results of grid management (see Covid Among Us for details) has been the hardening of the city’s informal boundaries. However, this process has been ongoing for several decades in part via the imposition of a second traffic grid on top of the original traffic grid. In practice, this has meant re-purposing earlier, narrow roads as the internal roads of a cordoned off housing estates 小区 and laying a wider, more extensive network around the newly isolated gated community. In other words, what was initially planned as an open city, was incrementally partitioned and closed off even before grid management came online. In some sense, 2022 zero-Covid protocols merely accelerated a process that was already underway. Once you understand the logic of how the traffic grid was re-inscribed, its possible to see how boundaries were hardened through urban expansion.
Shenzhen Noted 