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.

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.

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!).

Shenzhen Speed

We crossed the border from Hong Kong into Shenzhen, China last Saturday. The crossing was a bit of a disaster. I realized that my backpack was missing and I had to go back to the University of Hong Kong to get it. The students and the professors went to the border without me, and I crossed alone about an hour after them. The crossing itself was very easy and fast, but I found out when I caught up with the group that one of our students had been turned away because of a typo on her visa. This is the kind of thing you hope doesn’t happen, but that there's no easy solution for when it does. She and one of the professors had to double back to Hong Kong and wait two days to get to the Chinese embassy for a fresh visa.

In the meantime, the rest of us got an introduction to the phenomenon known as “Shenzhen Speed.” A town that was a sleepy fishing village of about 30,000 in the early '80's (less than the year-round population of Chapel Hill, NC), a mere two decades has transformed Shenzhen into a towering metropolis of over 12 million. The “King of the Earth” skyscraper is noted not so much for its design as for the fact that it was constructed at a rate of one story every three days (total of 69 stories). The first and most successful special economic zone (SEZ), Shenzhen is now home to the world's largest factory complex, the Foxconn facility that employs 200,000 workers who make (among many products) every single iPod nano in the world. We visited the Foxconn facility yesterday, but of course what we saw and heard was far different from others.

On the streets of Shenzhen, you can still buy scallion pancakes from street vendors and get run over by a bicycle, just like every other city in China. However, you can also buy limitless numbers of knockoff designer brand products, depending on how much you want to get yelled at and fined by US Customs. You can also hear the sound of the next stage of global warming, as the horns from skyrocketing private car ownership sound off and drivers hit pedestrians (China has the highest pedestrian fatality rate in the world), cut each other off, and idle in the middle of intersections while they figure out where they want to go.

Hong Kong and the Pearl River Delta

Hong Kong is located near the mouth of the Pearl River, which flows from Sichuan Province through southern China. The delta lies in Guangdong Province, where Deng Xiaopeng’s economic reforms began in 1981 with the establishment of the first “special economic zone” (SEZ) right next to the border with Hong Kong. This border already had great significance in Chinese economic history. In 1949, after the Communists rose to power, capital of all sorts drained out of the mainland and into Hong Kong. Money, talent, labor, experience, ideas, and energy brought a new level of activity to Hong Kong that the British alone had never achieved. Many refugees chose Hong Kong over Taiwan because it was more established. Their greatest priority was economic security, and this mentality continues in Hong Kong today. Though many yearn for democracy, the most important thing to the average Hong Kong person is the stability of the economy.

The Hong Kong economic juggernaut that started in 1950 attained new heights after the opening of China through the nearby SEZ. Where once garments and toys labeled “Made in Hong Kong” were common, production facilities shifted to the mainland to take advantage of cheaper land and labor. This produced a spatially bifurcated economy known as the “Front Shops, Back Factories” model. The capital, design, and leadership come from Hong Kong, while the raw materials and labor come from the Pearl River Delta. Hong Kong’s special role as a gateway to China became more important and enriching than ever, now that China was eager to export.

Today, however, exactly what the special role is for Hong Kong is less clear. When SARS struck Hong Kong in 2003, the economy took a nosedive. Commercial activity came to standstill. Today in Hong Kong, residents often remark on this or that place that they used to go to that closed during SARS, never to re-open. After the epidemic, what saved Hong Kong was the Pearl River Delta. At the request (more like desperate begging) of the Hong Kong government, the Chinese central government eased the border control between Guangdong Province and Hong Kong. A special, easy-to-get visa that allowed day trips to Hong Kong by mainland visitors was created. Now, the new middle and upper classes created in China by the economic reforms come to Hong Kong to spend hundreds of thousands of yuan on the very latest genuine designer merchandise. As in 1950, Hong Kong prospers from capital flowing over the border from China. This time, however, it’s a reciprocal relationship – Hong Kong is still a major source of the venture capital that supports the Pearl River Delta enterprises that are creating new wealth in China.

Why isn't Hong Kong like Bangkok?

Well, obviously there are a lot of reasons. This question was asked by a student concerning transportation in particular. Among the many large, compact megacities in Asia, Bangkok has become notorious for traffic congestion and air pollution. Drivers of Thai motorcycle taxis wear face masks when out on the street, and the mass transit system is dilapidated and under-used. On the other hand, while Hong Kong is not without air quality problems or rush hour jams, it is not only possible but easy to cross half of Hong Kong Island and head deep into Kowloon in less than half an hour (including transfers), for about $2 US, with no knowledge of Cantonese language or literacy in Chinese characters.

Density and land use mixing are both generators of traffic and prerequisites for transit. Bangkok and Hong Kong are both extraordinarily dense centers of housing, commerce, industry, culture, and government. So why is one choked with vehicles while the other, despite much more challenging geographic constraints (water, topography) provides extraordinary mobility? Clearly one part of the problem is simply inadequate transit development in Bangkok. The train system there was developed right before the 1998 Asian financial crisis, and the system’s implementation was crippled by the ensuing recession. Hong Kong’s system is partially privatized, and benefits from state-of-the-art infrastructure, scheduling, and fare collection. However, variations in transit quality alone don’t seem like enough to explain the globally sub-par transportation situation in Bangkok or the bold success of Hong Kong.

The answer lies in the realization that transportation planning is like a coin. On one side are the necessary conditions for mass mobility: land use density/mix and transit infrastructure. On the other side are the sufficient conditions to guarantee transit success: pedestrian safety, market-based anti-car policies, and transportation demand management. It must be easy and safe to walk, with a minimum of obstacles and threats from other transportation modes. Anti-car policies include scarce parking, expensive permitting, fuel taxes, and road pricing. And finally, transportation demand management enables and rewards frequent transit use through education, trip subsidy/discounts (at right, the Hong Kong 'octopus' card), and policies and programs targeting employers. When you turn over the coin in Bangkok, it is blank. In Hong Kong, you’d probably have to use one of those crazy micro-lasers that can write the whole Bible on a grain of rice to fit it all in.