More Real Than Real

You've probably seen reports in the media lately about fake products in China, and I'm not talking about Gucci. Just in the past few weeks, reports about fake toothpaste, tires, and rotten seafood have surfaced. China accused the international media of hyping minor regulatory slips, while at the same time executing the former head of the Chinese FDA for taking bribes. I can tell you that it's definitely not hype - China is full of fakes.

Fake water. Fake soy sauce. Fake liquor. And it's not just unlucky drunken expats waking up with formaldehyde hangovers. In 2004 hundreds of babies in Anhui and Shandong Provinces died after being fed fake baby formula that did not contain any protein, but that caused a bloating symptom that concealed the infants' malnutrition from doctors. This is what it's like on the cutting edge of capitalism, where there's nothing to stop people from making fake baby formula. Did those producers want to murder babies? No, they just wanted to make money, and without regulation the only way to beat your competitor and get some money to feed your kids is to starve someone else's. Quality control costs money, just like fair labor practices, protecting the environment, and so on. And there are more workers than jobs for every position you can think of in China, so everyone's going entrepreneur. Buyer beware.

There's a Japanese anime movie called "Grave of the Fireflies." One of the main characters is a little girl, three or four years old. She's a cartoon, but she's also the most real child I have ever seen on screen. She is the pure expression of the idea and essence of a little girl, without any of the intermediate mess - a young actress struggling to portray a girl, or having to watch an actual human person experience the story of this little girl, which ends in death. She is still an interpretation of a little girl, rather than an actual one, and this makes her more real than real. The fundamental energy is communicated on the screen, rather than the whole construct, and you see right to the center.

In that case, artistic license is more than acceptable, it's unique, important, and valuable. So why is a fake so wonderful here, and so horrifying in my medicine cabinet? It's not just because one can make me sick, because watching "Grave of the Fireflies" put me in bed with the covers pulled all the way up for a good 24 hours. It's not false advertising, because "Fireflies" was, of all things, screened as a double feature in theaters with the happiness-confection "My Neighbor Totoro." Moviegoers who saw "Totoro" first walked out of the second feature, unprepared and unable to handle the grim "Fireflies."

And that's the key. You walk out of the movie, but you don't ask for your money back because you thought the movie would be more fun. There's an implied guarantee in soy sauce, bottled water, toothpaste, and baby formula that doesn't exist for movies. It's also why no one except movie industry executives cares about bootleg Chinese DVDs, a kind of fake that everyone loves. The very cutting edge of the faking trend is that the myth of China as a bottomless well of cheap goods and dangerous fakes is getting complicated. While once a fake Rolex was valuable just as a substitute for the real thing, China is learning the real meaning of value. You'd still better check the seal on your water bottle, but it's getting so that you can also find the great fakes, amazing stuff that will delight you, shock you, and change you. Walk into a boutique in Beijing, and it might not be all Chloe and Levis knockoffs. You might meet a Chinese entrepreneur who designs and sews her own clothes, and you can buy her originals from her, and for a fraction of the price of such clothes in the US. Walk into an art gallery in Beijing, and it's not all copies of the Mona Lisa or propaganda posters with your face painted in. I saw a copy of the Statue of Liberty, but she was a little girl holding an ice cream cone. It struck me silent, and for two days I couldn't bring myself to say anything to anyone in China because I was too embarrassed.

Eventually, China will find a way to enforce the line between what is false and what is more real than real. When that happens, more Chinese producers than ever will start to climb the value chain towards the place where there are fewer guarantees about content and meaning: design, marketing, and so on. Don't think there's anyone in China who just loves cranking out the rotten shellfish. They are just waiting for the leadership to reform the country enough so that everyone can head in a new direction, and I'm hoping that direction will be the most real - an original new way of governing, urbanizing, entertaining, consuming, and living that will make the rest of this century more fun and more of a struggle for the rest of us.

A Day in the Life of a Chinese Biker

8:55 AM - Walk to the first floor of my building. The first floor consists of a lobby and parking for bicycles, hundreds of them. Though Beijing is rapidly converting from bikes to cars, 30% of trips in this city are still by bike and it is still the most common mode for travel.

8:56 AM - Find my bike and unlock it. The locks people use here are really flimsy. Everyone operates by statistical principle rather than the laws of physics. In other words, someone's bike is going to get stolen, but it probably won't be mine.

8:57 AM - Roll my bike down the ramp to the street and start riding. I am not wearing a helmet. I have yet to see a single person in China wearing a helmet.

9:06 AM - Ride to Starbucks, weaving in and out of pedestrians, fruit carts, other bikers, pedicabs, mopeds, e-bikes, some waiguoren on rollerblades, and a taxi that is in the bike lane. Plenty of room, because the bike lane is wide enough for 2 cars. Some places in downtown Beijing used to have bike lanes that were seven car-lengths wide!

9:08 AM - See a red light ahead. Ride straight through it without pausing, looking left to confirm that all the oncoming traffic is turning. Three other bikers do the same.

9:12 AM - Park my bike at Starbucks. The bike parking facility is fenced in, covered, and guarded at all times. The guard's main job is to keep the bikes tidy and stacked so that there is a lot of room for more bikes. It's like valet parking, for bikes, and it's free.

11:52 AM - Lunchtime! Get bike from guard, and ride down the street on the wrong side, into oncoming traffic. Much swerving required, still easier than trying to cross the huge road full of death-taxis. All bike lanes carry two-way traffic like this, even though there is no agreement about which side each direction should be riding on.

12:03 PM - Lock my bike in front of the canteen in a row with other bikes. Sometimes when someone is getting their bike, they knock over the bike next to them and they start going down like dominoes. I once saw six bikes fall down at once.

12:40 PM - Done eating. It's starting to rain. It's OK, the bike has fenders. I open my umbrella and ride to my lab by steering with one hand and holding the umbrella above me with the other. Everyone else is doing this too, except the people who have special bike-ponchos.

12:52 PM - Park at the lab. One of my lab mates pulls up, carrying another lab mate as a passenger on the back of his bicycle rack. She hops off as he pulls to a halt, effortlessly.

5:55 PM - Want to go home. On the way I pass a woman who is riding a contraption that is half-bike, half kitchen for cooking street food. There is a man sleeping in the back on the 'counter'!

6:15 PM - Lock back up under my building. If by lock up I mean just leave my bike down there. It probably won't get stolen.

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.

Fuwa

So, the Olympics are coming to Beijing. Those li'l cuties up there are the mascots for the Games. The logic for having five is that there is one for each ring. Also, the mascot is usually a native animal of the country, and since China is so big if you just pick one animal there are regions that will feel left out. And of course, the joke around China is that by having five that means that everyone has to buy five times as much Olympic-themed souvenirs and merchandise. Personally, I am completely infatuated with these guys, and I love the little background stories that the Chinese have whipped up for them.

Chinese culture is so different from the US. Sometimes it's hard to imagine how are two countries can become close and work together, because it seems impossible for us to agree with each other. What I hope is possible is that Americans and Chinese can learn to understand each other well enough to communicate and form working relationships where each side knows what to expect from the other side. We don't have to want to be like each other, if we can comprehend, accept, and respect each other. Maybe the Olympics really can embody the spirit of this kind of cooperation.

Why so good?

I don't want to be all down on China. I love this country, and this trip has been great. My last post was a little negative, in part because I'm ronery now that all the students are gone and I'm in Beijing alone, but at the same time I have no privacy thanks to the curious sleep habits of my Singaporean roommate. It's a tough combo. So let me take a moment to share a couple of the wonderful things about daily life in China.

For breakfast this morning I ate dan bing, my favorite Chinese street food. It's a crepe/pancake. You break an egg up all over one side, and sprinkle with scallions. Then, you flip it over, and paint the other side with tasty bean sauce and hot sauce, sprinkle a little fresh ginger, maybe a crushed peanut or two. Add a weird fried crispy thin dough thing and then fold it all up and feast. I first ate this in Xi'an, and it rocked my world. At left, the woman who changed my life.

For lunch I ate a fresh Asian pear. They cost $2 each in the U.S. Here, I paid the equivalent of about 20 cents. Thus, it's not just that Chinese food is really tasty, really fresh, and skillfully made. You can also taste the affordability! I've been chowing down since I crossed the border into Shenzhen. While we were there, we made friends with a bunch of the university students. Whenever they ate something they liked, they would always exclaim, "Why so good?!?" The Chinese in general eat with a great deal of zest, and it's fun to join in.

The Tangled Web We Weave

We've all heard about how personal auto ownership is on the rise in China. There's a graph everyone likes to show of China's GDP and auto ownership that shows them both rocketing up in the last 20 years. One version of it is at right, from K. Riley, "Motor vehicles in China: the impact of demographic and economic changes," Population and Environment, 23(5), p. 479 - 494. So, personal incomes are rising in China and people can afford the cars that they want for status and convenience. Not exactly rocket science.

The interesting part of all of this is the policy that lies behind the graphs. Don't make the mistake of thinking that all Chinese cities have the same kind of transportation policies. In fact, there is a remarkable diversity of policies on everything from electric bikes to auto permits to jaywalking that reflect the varying cultures of different places in the country. In Shanghai, were I noted previously that cars are nothing novel, an ownership permit costs a whopping 50,000 RMB (about $6,250), and that's in addition to buying the car, insurance, fuel (heavily taxed), etc. Now that's some transportation demand management! In Beijing, however, as of 2000 the permit to own a car is basically free. Additionally, all quotas on permits have been lifted. There are 3,000,000 cars on the road in Beijing and 1,000 more hit the road every day. Suffice to say, infrastructure supply is lagging behind and that means major congestion.

This is a paradox. Beijing is trying with all its might to clean up the air in anticipation of the 2008 Olympics. Why have this policy that undermines that effort? The answer is that the Beijing government has a lot of fish to fry, and sometimes they overlap. Here are the other agenda items:

1) Shanghai charges for permits. Beijing is better than Shanghai, so forget that!
2) Also in 2000, a new Hyundai factory opened in Beijing, providing much-wanted jobs, and keeping Hyundai happy is an important economic development strategy
3) The government gets a lot of tax income from car sales

In short, car manufacturing is a "pillar industry" in China now, and the domestic market is a way to double-dip on that economically. I am honestly in doubt about what is going to happen when foreign athletes arrive to compete in the Games and find that they can't do their best because they have throat infections from the dizzying, smothering haze of smog that hangs over Beijing basically every day. I'm not exaggerating - I have one right now, my snot has turned a truly insane color, my lymph nodes are swollen, and I spend maybe a total of 60 minutes outside on any given day. There's been a lot of hype about Beijing's success with improving air quality, but that says more about what it was like before than what it's like now. Check out the picture at left. Still no direct sunlight in the 'after' image!

The bigwigs in Beijing have always been pros at ignoring or rationalizing inconvenient contradictions. What will they do with this one?

Historic Preservation

One topic I've mentioned a few times here is the Cultural Revolution that happened in the '70s in China, and the destruction of "The Four Olds." In the post-Mao era, a reassessment of that policy has occurred. The official party line is now that Mao was 70% right, 30% wrong, and that the destruction of all old cultural artifacts was not the greatest policy. This has led to decent preservation of stuff like the terra cotta warriors, the Forbidden City, the Temple of Heaven, etc.

There's a growing interest in preserving the more prosaic spaces of Chinese urban life, however, especially this new fad in Beijing for weeping over the impending doom of the city's hutong neighborhoods as the Olympics approach. I couldn't agree more about preserving the hutongs, but the will to do that has to come from native Chinese, not expats drunk on exotic Old Beijing. I mean, I'm sure expats can help, given the huge role that foreign direct investment plays in China. I just see a lot more talking than doing, which always annoys me.

In Shanghai, the architecture firm of Ben Woods created Xintiandi, similar to 'festival marketplaces' like Fanueil Hall in Boston and Pike Place in Seattle. In fact, Ben Woods was trained by the architects that did those projects. However, since this is China, it's got to be 'festival marketplaces with Chinese characteristics.' So Xintiandi takes the old buildings and narrow alleys of a Shanghai neighborhood and converts them into premium, top-of-the-line luxury retail and dining. Current tenants include DR Bar (part owned by Ben Woods), an unbelievably cool martinis-and-low-light establishment concealed within Xintiandi's alleys (the entrance is pictured at left). Kind of reminds me of some of the cooler spaces of downtown Providence.

We visited the architects' office, and the first thing they emphasized was that this was not historic preservation, simply an urban development with a historic influence. The architect had a very simple definition of what it means to be urban - connected and related to what is around you, in space and time. I love that definition. It's very simple and very clear. However, a historic preservationist would have saved as much of the old neighborhood as possible, while Ben Woods saved only those buildings and spaces that could be profitable in the final development, and gutted all of the interiors. It would be so cool if projects like Xintiandi could be done for areas other than the most wealthy spaces in Shanghai, and if more could be preserved. It's not really reasonable to expect the private sector to do that, so maybe the growing community of Chinese NGOs will spawn historic preservation groups that want to work with the government to do that kind of project.

China Eats the World

On this trip we've been reading Tom Campanella's forthcoming book "China Reinvents the City" from Princeton University Press. It's hard to imagine a book about China that is more engaging. I recommend it, and most of the ideas in this post are from the book.

China's economic boom has allowed the national psyche to make major strides in recovering from some of the traumas of the Mao years. First, the influx of prosperity and resources means that for a lot of people, scarcity and hardship are either unknown or a distant memory (however, I should emphasize that life is getting harder for some as reforms progress). Second, the new availability of resources and leisure time in China has spawned an unprecedented building spree of theme parks that commodify China's culture and sell it to the masses, essentially remanufacturing one of "The Four Olds" destroyed in the Cultural Revolution. The first of these theme parks was Splendid China in Shenzhen, followed by over 2,500 more from 1989 to the present, including Tang Paradise, Yunnan Ethnic Villages, and countless Buddhism-themed parks. Unlike American theme parks, which are oriented towards amusing children and gratifying thrill-seekers, Chinese theme parks provide an opportunity for adults to rediscover and consume Chinese culture and history in a bizzare mix of miniaturizations of major buildings and topographic features, song-and-dance shows (or "Vegas and Bollywood with Chinese characteristics", as I like to call them), and mechanized statuary and fountains.

Not all 2,500 of those theme parks are about China. In addition to theming and consuming the landscapes of China itself, there is an enormous appetite for flavors from abroad. We visited "Windows on the World," right next to Splendid China in Shenzhen, a theme park that is essentially a giant garden full of miniatures of various wonders of the world, like the Pyramids, Angkor Wat, the Lincoln Memorial, etc. There is a powerful will in China to explore the world afresh after years of isolation, through consumption. There I am at left with some students, next to the Eiffel Tower, in China!

The most recent manifestation of all this theming and consumption seems almost logical if you can just accept the premise. In the suburbs of Shanghai, nine new towns are being constructed as part of Shanghai's regional plan. In a wild riff on Shanghai's history as an international treaty port, with different concession areas taking on different urban forms, each new town has a European country as its theme, and the theme is implemented by private developers right down to the security guards' uniforms. It's hard to believe, until you see.

I Make Like Tintin

And ride around Shanghai in a pedicab. I'm with one of the students on the trip who is my roommate where we're staying in town, Krisanna.

The Rise and Fall and Rise of Shanghai

I took a hard sleeper train from Xi'an to Shanghai, about 16 hours from 7 pm to 11 am, rocked to sleep by the train on Saturday night. The hard sleeper is big train cars, with a long hallway down one side and sections of bunks stacked 3 high at close intervals. It was surprisingly cozy and fun, but I'll admit I didn't sleep much. Still, it's a great way to get around China, cheap and time-saving. I'm going to try again for my trip up to Beijing and I think I'll sleep better if I can get a top bunk.

Shanghai is a totally different ballgame from other cities in China. Designated as a Treaty Port at the same time as the British took control of Hong Kong (end of the Opium Wars), Shanghai grew in importance much faster than the island colony. Already an established trading port, once the British, French, Japanese, and American concessions were established Shanghai became the most important city in China. The first soccer game in China, the first cars, telegraphs, electricity, modern universities, trolleys, you name it, Shanghai was the place. From the 1840s to the 1930s, Shanghai's star kept rising.

Finally arriving in Shanghai is a loaded experience for me. I was here in 1997, but I didn't see much, and I've read way more about Shanghai than I've ever seen. Pre-WWII Shanghai is romanticized by a lot of people, but for me the defining vision of a Shanghai teeming with opium dens and foreigners, and an image of the Bund with junks bobbing offshore in the water comes from "Tintin and the Blue Lotus," written by Herge in 1936. Tintin uncovers a lot of Japanese espionage in Shanghai and dashes about town from the Chinese walled city to the British and American international settlements, sneaking past the many border controls and competing authorities. Herge's work was inspired by the actual historic events transpiring in China at the time, which led to the Japanese invasion of Manchuria and Shanghai.

Shanghai fell to the Japanese during the second Sino-Japanese war in 1938, and it's never been the same since. Whether it has changed for the better or the worse depends on who you ask. Yearning for the Jazz Age pinnacle of Shanghai in 1930 is common among ex-pats around town. However, most Chinese celebrate 1949 as the liberation of Shanghai, when the Chinese eliminated foreign control (if not foreign influence) and re-Sinified the city. Today, the seminal skyline of Shanghai is not the neoclassical buildings of the Bund but the new Pudong central business district across the river (right). No one seems to think that TV tower "The Pearl," (close-up below) which looks like a shish-kebab, is at all unattractive. Chinese people love it. That said, some yearn for the old Shanghai not because they love colonial excess and privilege, but because the future seems weird and arbitrary, guided by a confused vision of Chinese power but uncertain purpose.

Yaodong

On Friday we visited a part of China that I had no idea existed. I have traveled around China quite a bit, and read even more about it, so it's rare for me to be caught completely by surprise. We drove three hours north of Xi'an, which was already kind of in the middle of nowhere, to a tiny village that was really in the middle of nowhere.

The Loess Plateau covers an area of northern China equivalent to the area of Belgium, mostly along the upper reaches of the Yangtze River. The geography of the plateau is extraordinary. Summer temperatures are regularly above 100 degrees Fahrenheit, while winter temperatures are below –20. The soil is incredibly dry and fine, but much heavier than sand. This extra weight is due to the fact that the plateau is not a desert – there is a three-month monsoon season in the autumn that drowns the world, though the rest of the year is very dry. These extreme rains have shaped the plateau into a series of ravines along the Yangtze, and allowed a substantial amount of agriculture to flourish. The hillsides have all been shaped into terraces, and every little possible patch of land is cultivated. Thus, the Loess Plateau supports a population of about 40 million, remarkable for an area of poor access and scarce resources. Despite it’s size, population, and beauty, I had no idea this place existed. Check out the view on the right!

This region of extremes is notable for some of the most and least sustainable practices in China. The intensive agriculture required because of population pressure causes substantial erosion and silting in the Yangtze River that creates flooding problems downstream. This is a huge problem for China as a whole. However, the people of the Loess Plateau have also evolved an incredibly material- and energy-efficient housing form, and this is what we traveled to Henan Province, Da Ping Zhuang (Great Peace Village) in order to see. To cope with the unusual conditions of their region, the Loess Plateau inhabitants have evolved a truly remarkable form of vernacular architecture. Similar to the adobe cliffside dwellings of the first peoples of the American southwest, the residents of the Loess Plateau build yaodongs, underground cave-like housing of astonishing complexity and beauty. At left, looking down from the ground level into the courtyard of the house of an extended family. Each door off the main area is a bedroom, storage area, or little barn.

The villagers came from miles around to meet us. They were overwhelmingly warm and welcoming, and by the time we left, several of the students had to be dragged back onto the bus. I could see the appeal. Inside the rooms, it felt air conditioned, even though it was 100 degrees outside. The houses were mostly over 300 years old, i.e. older than the United States, but many were still habitable. The rooms were plain but cozy, and the village was full of adorable children and fruit trees. The outdoor cooking facilities were minimal but efficient. It's clearly a harsh life, but very attractive to city-weary students. At right, a view of one of the rooms. The bed on the left is made of brick, and can be heated on the inside like an oven in the winter.

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.

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.