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.