Tag Archives: shenzhen

futian district, report on

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Shenzhen rushes forward, or keeps rushing forward. The Districts also hurry along toward goals that change with a shift in leadership. And yet the meetings drag. Even an hour. Drag.

Day before yesterday, Futian District invited me to observe their report on the work of the government. Wang Qiang presented. Highlights? The speed at which the economy continues to lurch upward. Futian per capita GDP hit US$32,700 surpassing that of South Korea. Indeed, the report of government work began with economic statistics and just kept pounding home the point — the business of government is, well, business. Futian fixed assests grew at 8.5 percent, exports surged 50%, and tax revenues grew at 7.7% surpassing all other districts. Futian has developed something called a “building economy” that is basically tax revenue from specific buildings. In 2013, five more buildings were added to the list of 68 buildings generating more than 100 million yuan in annual tax revenue. The economic focus is high-end industry and includes what is apparently called “headquarters economy (总部经济)” whereby a government attracts multinational companies to locate their headquarters in a particular territory. Apparently three Fortune 500 companies also invested in Futian.

Futian holds shopping festivals, electronics consumption festivals at Huaqiangbei, and is promoting commerce growth. The District has introduced six international or state level innovation centers, including the Cisco R&D Center and the Functional Materials Research Institute under the Chinese Academy of Engineering Physics. Futian is promoting intellectural property rights service intustries and a pilot zone for “technology plus finance development”. Intensive development of industrial land (Futian has many older industrial parks), online interface between the public and government, and more sophisticated forms of urban management — all are projects forwarded in 2013… anyway, you get the idea. Information dump. Drag.

But. There was a point (from the translated report):

Our achievements over the past year can be attributed to the correct leadership of the municipal committee of the CPC, the municipal government and the district committee of the CPC, as well as the efforts by the people of Futian.

The District’s English portal introduces Futian and its charms. To illustrate the ongoing transformation of Futian, I offer photographic impressions from the subway installation at Huaqiangbei.

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impressions from urban fetish

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A few shots from the performance! From handpuppets through sandcastles to silver models of buildings that landed like science fiction extraterrestials, urban fetish was a a celebration of creativity, desire and excess.

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the right to depend on one’s son

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In Xintang, Baishizhou, this 60-year old gentleman has been protesting for a month. His demand? He wants the right to depend on his son for his old age care.

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In Shenzhen, parents can transfer their hukou from hometowns to the SEZ based on their children’s hukou status. Once they have this hukou, they can take advantage of subsidized medical care from their 65th birthday. The problem? This gentleman’s son does not have a Shenzhen hukou. In addition, he does not own a house and is facing eviction upon the completion of negotiations to raze Baishizhou (admittedly at least two or three years in the future). At such time, he will loose his shop, and without equity in the building, will not receive compensation. So he is facing a perilous retirement.

The wording of the protest is of interest. 投靠 (tóu kào) literally means “throw oneself to depend upon”. It can also be translated as “become a retainer of”. Within the rhetoric of this protest, this gentleman is demanding the right to become his son’s retainer.

The form of his demand is similarly coached in feudal language; indeed his banners function as petitions to leaders rather than as social demands. He asks Xi Jinping, for example, if the General Secretary realizes that although in Beijing old people have welfare, the old people in Shenzhen have a different situation. He then asks Xi Jinping to visit Shenzhen and see the situation. Likewise, he asks Shenzhen Secretary Wang Rong and Shenzhen Mayor Xu Qin where the Communist Party is.

The moral economy of noblesse oblige gives these questions their oppositional force. The question put to Xi Jinping implies that if the General Secretary understood the true situation in Shenzhen, he would rectify it. The question put to Wang Rong is even more pointed: has the Communist Party abandoned its responsibility to take care of the people?

In order to make this moral claim, the gentleman also demonstrates that he has upheld his end of the moral contract between government and the future. First, he followed the one child policy and only gave birth to a son. Second, he came to Shenzhen twenty-three years ago to make a better life for himself and his family. During that time, his son was back in his hometown to go to school. Third, he never broke any other laws.

Shenzhen has been at the forefront of reforming its pension system. In practice, this has been the commodification of services. For those with Shenzhen hukou, there are still some benefits. However, as this gentleman reminds us, in the present real security comes through family ties and home ownership.

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baishizhou update

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We’ve known for a while that the Tangtou rowhouses had been condemned. In fact, for the second half of 2012 and a few months in 2013, CZC tried to rent a room for our art intervention, but could not because even though people still lived in the houses, there had been ongoing evictions. Instead, we ended up renting a handshake efficiency (302!)in Shangbaishi, near the Jiangnan Grocery Store.

Yesterday, I saw that they had actually begun the process of sealing off the alleys between buildings. But the eviction process is just that, a process and there are still signs of inhabitation. In addition, the well at the southern edge of the Tangtou row house plaza has been hidden behind a white screen. The screen, however, has created a semi-private area, where women seem more comfortable doing their laundry. In fact, I haven’t seen this many women working at the well in a while.

I also wandered south across Shennan Road into the actual Baishizhou, where the wall between the urbanized village and Window of the World dramatically announces mixed-use with post-modern characteristics. The Baishizhou side of the wall reads like a half-built and abandoned handshake building, while the WoW side models the Corcovado mountain range just outside Rio de Janeiro, where Christ the Redeemer blesses theme park visitors.

Impressions, below.

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renting, home ownership, and rights to the city

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

coming home to the liberal arts

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

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

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

And yet.

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

Yet, again.

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

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

creative culture INDUSTRY

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Visited the old Nanfang Glass Factory in Shekou. The factory is being renovated by 凤火, an advertising company that made its mark marketing real estate. It is now investing in cultural renovation and creativity in old Shekou. The other day we visited the site, which will open as (yes, another) art-culture space. Once again, my fondness for heroic high-modernism makes itself felt in impressions, below:

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situating the northbound imaginary

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A good friend re-discovered an old, 1996 article not only from the early daze of Shenzhen research, but also pre-digital scholarship; when I lost the paper, I actually couldn’t click it back into existence.

Anyway, for the curious, “O’Donnell. Situating the Northbound Imaginery. 1996.“, Hong Kong Cultural Studies, Volume 6, 1996:105-108 pp.

what to see when visiting shenzhen…

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

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

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

Arrr.

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

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

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

there is no city here…

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

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

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

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