Friday, June 8, 2007

The New Old

Everybody knows that astrology is a really big part of Chinese culture. The signs of the Chinese zodiac, the lunar calendar, and feng shui interior design are all aspects of this. In Mandarin, China is “中国,” the Middle Country. The ultimate expression of the Chinese understanding of the cosmos, however, is at a scale less noticeable to the casual observer but far more significant. Built into the very fabric of Chinese urban life at every scale, the architectural and urban design principles that shaped the construction of imperial cities including Chang’an, Nanjing, and Beijing express the perceived order of the cosmos. City planning and cultural expression reached a synergistic zenith in imperial China. As early as 2000 BC, urban settlements were arranged to comply with the “mandate of heaven,” expressing the astral logic at the center of 5000 years of Chinese culture. The city itself became a temple, a work of art, and an expressive instrument.

These principles included a symmetrical rectilinear layout, with orientation to the compass (a north-south axis at the center). Millenia before the American suburbs spawned gated communities, the Chinese valued a sense of enclosure via gates, moats, etc. The palace was located at the center, because the emperor was symbolized by the North Star, around which all the other stars in the heavens appear to rotate. Enclosure, symmetry, and compass orientation were reinforced through repetition at every scale of the city: house, neighborhood, and metropolis. For example, the a grid street layout means that each intersection is also a compass, indicating north, south, east, and west. At left is a recent satellite image of Xi'an, the modern Chang'an (the first imperial capital of China). I have added a red line indicating the main north-south avenue that passes through the main gates of the city wall. Note how this avenue combined with the walls forms the character for middle/zhong, "中," the symbol for China itself. Intense!

During the Cultural Revolution, Chairman Mao led a campaign to eliminate “The Four Olds.” Many relics of China's imperial past were destroyed, including Beijing's old city walls. This makes Xi'an the last remaining great example of Chinese imperial city planning. Today, a new appreciation for the past in Chinese culture is merging with optimism about the future to create a new Chinese city. Both ancient and modern great works are celebrated and almost worshiped. At left, the Xi'an city walls at night. Below, the Xi'an airport expressway.

Wednesday, June 6, 2007

Tracy In Action

There has been a request to see more of me "in action." Your wish is my command, so here you are - on our last night in Shenzhen, we did what all the factory workers do and went out to karaoke with the local students we had met that week. A microphone was thrust into my hand when Whitney Houston's "I Will Always Love You" came on, and I went with it.




Tuesday, June 5, 2007

I (Don't) Want It That Way

Chinese internet cafes are amazing places. Hundreds of computers are filled with boys playing Counterstrike and World of Warcraft, with my students wandering in between trying to check their email. I sit in the corner eating my tasty street food breakfast. It's a crepe, with an egg, and some tsong (green onions), and some...other stuff. I dunno. Crispy. Good.

They play American pop music that was popular about 10 years ago here. Every single day, multiple times a day, sometimes twice in a row, I hear "I Want It That Way" by the Backstreet Boys. I seriously think that they cue up this song when I walk in (I've become a regular here) and then repeat it. I'm not being paranoid - no other song is repeated so much!

Urban Villages

Just as all Gaul is divided into three parts, so is land in China. In 1949, when the Communists established their government, part of the socialist revolution entailed seizing all major assets as property of the state. This included all the land in China. That's right...all the land (pardon my Family Guy reference). Most land use planning and economic development planning in China are accomplished by manipulating the supply of land. Since the state has total control, this makes planning astonishingly easy and potentially very effective. To begin with, all land in China is classified as urban, rural agricultural, or rural residential. The urban land is controlled directly by the state through municipal governments. The rural land is controlled by collectives.

The collectives are essentially communities of rural residents (over 80% of the people in China) who live together and farm their land, which is owned by the group. Various land reforms in China since the revolution have adjusted the way the collectives work, but their basic right of group ownership has remained secure. Thus, when a municipality wants to expand, the state must negotiate to acquire land from the collectives. By the Chinese constitution, no land can be developed until it is transferred from rural agriculture to urban, with cash compensation to the farmers in the collective. Land reforms in the 1980's made it legal for municipalities to transfer land use, as opposed to land ownership, rights to private entities. As you can imagine, rapidly expanding cities like Shenzhen want to acquire land because the municipalities make lots of money off of leasing the land use rights for 50 or 70 years to private developers for substantial up-front one-time fees (on a separate note, no one knows what the Chinese government is going to do when these leases, the earliest of which will expire around 2030, run out). However, the farmers aren’t too excited about such land transfers, because they don't see the vast majority of these profits.

The farmers cannot develop the rural agricultural land on their own. Therefore, this land is generally sold off to the municipalities in exchange for cash. However, the collectives have by and large retained their rural residential land (i.e. land that they are allowed to develop for any use on their own). Though transferring their residential land to the municipalities would yield some benefits, such as the cash compensation and access to the much better urban pension and education systems, etc, many collectives have opted for the much greater potential profit of developing their rural residential land themselves. This produces the phenomenon of “urban villages,” where all the agricultural land surrounding a village is converted to the urban classification and developed according to the municipality's comprehensive plan, but the core residential village remains, an island of rural life in the middle of an urban ocean.

In Shenzhen, a shocking 62% of the land area within the boundaries of the city lies in these urban villages, and is thus controlled by various collectives instead of the municipalities. Most of these villages have been redeveloped, meaning that the original rural housing has been torn down and replaced by tightly packed high-rises. The former farmers of one collective we visited, between 1,000 – 2,000 people, are now making fortunes as the landlords of about 60,000 people, mostly migrant workers who have come to Shenzhen to work in the many factories there. These redevelopments do not have to comply with any urban building code, producing “kissing buildings,” so called because they are so close together that people in different buildings can lean out and, you know, kiss (above, left). You can spot the urban villages as you drive around Shenzhen by the extreme proximity of the towers.

The planning authorities in Shenzhen would like to see all of the urban villages redeveloped into, essentially, fancier housing that complies with the Shenzhen building code and comprehensive plan for Hong Kong commuters and the like. In general, the major public service these communities perform in housing the millions of migrant workers in Shenzhen who want to keep their housing costs rock-bottom low is not acknowledged, and major incentives are dangled in the face of the collectives to upscale. I can't help but think this is too bad. In the urban village we visited, the former villagers had redeveloped their area into an incredibly vibrant community, full of housing, retail, and public spaces. They have essentially transformed their business from farming into neighborhood planning. The soccer field was filled with children playing (at right, some of my students playing as well). The plazas were crowded with groups doing tai chi, playing hacky-sack and badminton, ballroom dancers, and the like. Though crime is generally higher in the urban villages than other parts of Shenzhen, the life on the streets there was more abundant than Hong Kong, New York, and Chapel Hill combined. This is caused by the fact that the average migrant workers housing unit is very small, so no one wants to spend much time in one's home. Also, the workers don't want to spend money on entertainment. So they gather in the plazas and bring a dazzling community to life.

Monday, June 4, 2007

Dumplings

We didn't eat dim sum while we were in Hong Kong. It is usually served as a brunch-lunch-afternoon food, and we didn't have enough free time during the day to run off and eat a sit-down meal like that. That means we have been in China for about 10 days now, and we have yet to eat jiao zi. The students can't really handle this. At each meal time, when once they would have asked patiently, "Ni you jiao zi ma?", they have taken to crying out “dump-dump!” like baby birds begging to be fed. In Shenzhen, the ground zero of modern globalization, a restaurant owner tells us in very slow Mandarin (because I can still barely comprehend) that we will not find a dumpling around here any closer than Fujian Province. The students wept, but I assured them that dumplings abound in Xi'an, our next stop. Suffice to say, garments may be global but food is still extremely local.

Yesterday we visited an urban village in Shenzhen (see next post) and ate their local dish, essentially called “the big bowl.” The dish is a huge bowl that combines between 12 and 16 different foods in layers of delicious: in our bowl we found everything from broccoli and tofu to pigs' feet and squid. Everyone parks around the table and chows down out of the huge bowl. This village has the world record for the most people eating the same dish at the same time, thanks to the big bowl (it was a really big bowl – about 3,500 people ate out of it!).