798

When China collectivized in the '50's, part of that meant reorganizing society in the most literal way. Production units were established. These might be schools, factories, or government departments. Everyone in the unit lived together in standardized housing, and the housing was located in an enclosed compound with the work spaces. These danweis often also included little stores, medical clinics, canteens, etc, so that people rarely left. Today, the danwei system has been pretty much chucked thanks to an elaborate series of reforms, but the infrastructure lingers.

Factory 798 in Beijing originally made electronics. Some smaller enterprises that work on that kind of stuff are still located in the old danwei, as is a bunch of privatized housing and a few stores. The majority of the factory space is abandoned, however. Artists have colonized the area and set up dozens of studios and galleries, so I went there today to check out the new 798, also called Dashanzi. Supposedly this is the very center of Chinese contemporary art.

The only graffiti you see in China is cell phone numbers sprayed on convenient buildings and walls, sometimes accompanied by a couple of characters. It's people looking for work, apartment for rent, and so on. I'm always hearing about how obsessed Chinese people are with hip hop, so I've been wondering where the hell the actual graf is at. Well, at 798 lots of those old factory walls are now covered in some amazing stuff! Check it out.







Here are some samples of other art that I saw, that I was impressed by. Like a jerk, I forgot to write down the artist's name. Actually, technically that makes me a thief. Argh.

Maybe we need to redefine rational.

In China, one gets the sense that urban planning has arrived home at last, to claim its throne. There are major museums dedicated to urban planning in prestigious locations in Shanghai and Beijing. You go inside and there are huge exhibits dedicated to comprehensive planning, historic preservation, transportation, insane levels of detail about plan implementation, 3-D mini-models and virtual flythroughs. And you see it outside the museums, too. Everywhere you go, the visions of planners are being implemented. Over 30 new subway systems are opening in China in the next five years. New towns cut from whole cloth are popping up on the landscape. With environmental planning now an issue, huge water and air cleanup projects are being accomplished. The Big Dig in Boston took God knows how many years and was billions over budget. China don't play like that.

As the economic, housing, and land reforms barrel forward, though, one gets the sense that more than just per capita GDP is changing. Though we have this image of the state being in total control, there are signs that the newly-rich, family-connected, bribe-dispensing factory owners and developers created by these reforms are running the show now. Or maybe it's that the show has new producers. Where once a blunt Marxist rationality ruled the day, it's no longer clear what the state is thinking. For example, let's look at what's happening in Beijing with all the growth. Lots of in-migration, and with the land reforms a lot of housing being built by private developers. The land is still owned by the state, and leased to the developers, so the government still has control. But now they have a financial incentive to redefine rationality from the socialist definition, serving the people, to the neoclassical economics definition, maximizing utility (and what is more useful than cash?). You can see it happening right before your eyes when you ride the Beijing subway:


Lines 1, 2, and 13 have been built so far. Don't ask where lines 3 - 12 are. And just look at line 13 there (yellow), looping around like some kind of drunken snake. The land use development is so out of control that the transportation planning process, which is controlled by engineers, not politicians or shamans, has gone cuckoo.

All this makes the dire predictions about China taking over the world while the US decays into irrelevance and mediocrity a little less scary, though it's still scary that China is the #1 buyer of US debt (Treasury bills). They aren't perfect robots over here, they have problems just like you and me. Now the response to that might be to think that if China's problems get out of control, it will cause an apocalypse. I want to reassure everyone that I have met many determined, capable people here who are dedicated to sustainability and understand very well that there are both good and bad lessons to be learned from the US. They are taking notes and working hard. Remember at all times that we are talking about the country that can accomplish this:

My Sino-Victorian Day

The peak of the Industrial Revolution in Britain was in the Victorian era. During this time, Britain urbanized, shifted from an agrarian to a manufacturing economy, expanded the middle class, and evolved a very distinct set of attitudes and social behavior. It's this culture that comes to mind when I hear the word 'Victorian,' though I suppose one also thinks of colonialism and furniture. My point is that China is undergoing a very similar transition right now, and the figures about urban migration and the economy are there to prove it. What's really fascinating is that you can also see the new era dawning in the bourgeois materialism and faith in social progress of the new Chinese middle class.

On Sunday I went to the Fragrant Hills, a regional park on the western outskirts of Beijing. The park has historic roots as an imperial playground and temporary HQ for Mao, but today people use the park in very modern ways.

My day hiking and wandering in the park started out very Victorian. Families were on promenade. How do I know that they weren't just enjoying fresh air and exercise? I saw a little girl in a pink lace dress and matching hat go strolling by (not exactly playwear). I saw a woman in an old-fashioned Anglo-style summer frock wearing high-heel wedge shoes and carrying a parasol climbing a 3000 ft. mountain. Picnics abounded. I experienced a mechanical marvel (rode a cable car up the mountain). Walking down, I encountered an older gentleman sketching portraits. The price was right, so I dawdled and hung out with the various children and other onlookers until it was my turn to have my picture drawn. The only way it could have been more Victorian would be if it had been a sillouette.

The artist had finished one of my eyes and my nose when I looked over and saw a man in a grey uniform holding my backpack. I hopped up and grabbed it back from him, and a fast exchange ensued between the uniformed man, his partner, and the artist. I realized that the artist was getting busted for running his little business in the park, and these guys were here to clear him out. They escorted him off, and I followed. We went down the hills a-ways, and they disappeared into an office disguised as a pagoda. I hoped they were just charging him a fine and throwing him out of the park, and that the fine wasn't too bad. I was shocked five minutes later to see a horde of about 30 men and women emerge from the pagoda - bottle collectors, water vendors, and the artist. They were all herded off down the hill and that was the last I saw of them.

So that's China's Victorian era for you. It's just like England, except they already have women's rights and the state is a lot more arbitrary in its policies. While it's OK for the vendor at the terra cotta warriors to literally punch me in the arm with his piece-of-junk mini-warrior, it's not OK for the bohemian-gentleman artist to draw my picture. I guess we were having too much fun and not generating enough activity in the Chinese economy.

On a final note, in my explorations of the park I found a huge carved stone turtle with a big tablet on its back (a common motif in China, something to do with longevity). The tablet had a bunch of ancient Chinese characters written on it, but someone had individually scratched out each one. Many of the features of the park had signs explaining that they had been burned by the Anglo-French forces in the 1860's and by the 8-Joint-Allied forces in 1900. However, there was no explanation here for the thorough defacing. It's not hard to guess who did this, and that's the creepy undertone of China that prevents one from fully enjoying the Victorian enthusiasm of today.