Nevertheless, the Dalang Commercial Center, itself a section of a larger industrial park symbolizes both Shenzhen’s larger de-instrialization and the turn to branded and internet based commerce. Although there is no Starbucks in the area (as there is just near the Longhua subway station), nevertheless, Micky D’s has already landed, and commercial activity is upper working class. In addition to “cheese heart coffee,” which is surprisingly tasty, it is also possible to buy the latest electronic toys and middle class fashion, as well as to sign children up for music classes and to have spa treatments.

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Here’s the rub. I saw this in an apartment complex in Dalang, at least twenty minutes from the nearest subway station. Everyone wants to by a house, and even places as relatively remote as Dalang are no longer viable options for migrants, even if they have a job, and even if they have savings.

On my way from said subway station to the elevator where this advert was posted, the cabby explained that since Lift (didi) and Uber had come to Shenzhen, it was no longer profitable to drive a cab. He planned on going back home to Jiangxi. When I mentioned that it seemed more and more people were leaving the city, he agreed, saying “there noticeably less people on the street.”

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These statistics obscure how Shenzhen’s urban villages spatially organize these three administrative classes. For example, Shi’ao (石凹) Village has a local population of 4 to 500 people and a renter population of 20,000, making the ratio of local to renter residents 1:40. The ratio of local to renter populations in Baishizhou is an astonishing 1:77. Moreover, it is clear that renters–even floaters–aren’t actually leaving the city. Instead, they are finding newer (and often) narrower niches within the village.

Much like US American suburbs which manage inequality through distance, Shenzhen’s urban villages do the hard (and socially productive) work of managing inequality within the city. The majority of floaters and a large percentage of permanent residents live in the villages and tend to work in service and the semi- and informal economies, while hukou residents and wealthier permanent residents occupy “official” housing estates and tend to work in the formal economy.

So how do villages manage the inequality?

Firstly, the village corporations are responsible for providing water, electricity, and sanitation services. For the last decade, the city has allowed villages to connect to the urban grid and provide these services via the market. Before 2006ish, the villages themselves provided these services through a variety of tactics, including using local wells and generators and unofficial tying into the municipal grid.

Secondly, villages tend to absorb the population working in nearby businesses. Shi’ao (石凹) Village abuts Dalang’s Fashion Valley and textile factories. Many of the workers and their families live in Shi’ao handshakes. Moreover, shop spaces in some handshake shops have been converted to workshops where piecework can be done on an ad hoc basis. Baishizhou has a higher end group of renters who work in the architecture and design firms of the neighboring OCT as well as in hi-tech park. However, the principle–villages provide housing for neighboring businesses–holds true in both inner and outer district villages.

Thirdly, villages provide low-capital spaces for start-ups and shops. The first story of every handshake building is designed for commercial use, while many factories have already been retrofitted as offices. This is especially true in inner district urban villages.

Fourthly, the city increasingly expects the villages to provide social services for renters. To this end, street office and district governments fund social workers and social projects that are run at the village level. In Baishizhou and other villages, for example, social workers have offices within the village from which they launch various services, such as after school programs and consultations.

Dalang Street Office has taken the idea of using social work to mediate potential social contradictions to the next level. In addition to upgrading a dormitory and running a library and education services at the Youth Dream Center, it is also working directly with villages to develop effective social programs. In Shi’ao, for example, Dalang District is working with a city NGO, Public Force (公众力) and the village party committee to support a project called, “the Textile Gang (布艺帮)”.

The Textile Gang does not aim to make money, but rather to generate social harmony while producing and selling enough products to break even. The project teaches sewing, weaving, and the-dying skills to anyone who lives in Shi’ao. The idea is that by working together to learn textile arts, residents will be able to build bridges across the divide between landlord and renter, creating a more harmonious society.

The Textile Gang matters because it indicates that Shenzhen is not only maturing as a society, but also recognizing that migrants aren’t leaving. Moreover, those migrants who can afford to send their children to school in Shenzhen are raising families in the villages.

Impressions of the links between the Textile Gang project in Shi’ao and piecework workshops on lanes within this outer district urban village, pictured above.

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Those of you who have been following the Baishizhou story know that Tangtou buildings were put up in 1958-9 when the original Tangtou village was flooded to build the Shiyan Reservoir. In the 1990s, the area was condemned as unsafe. However, the Nanshan District government did not start renting buildings and locking them until 2008. In December 2013, the remaining families were evicted and the site sealed off until today, when the surveys began.

The representative from the government explained that he had been assigned the task of unlocking the buildings because he had grown up nearby and was familiar with the villages. In fact, his family had come in the late 1970s with the border forces. During the 1980s, he grew up with the villagers and went crabbing along the coast, which used to come up to the southern side of Shennan Road.

He noted that the distance between villagers and outsiders began to grow after 1992. The implication was that forcing villagers into the role of landlords–without access to traditional livelihoods, transformed class structure in the area.

The post Tangtou, Baishizhou Buildings in Shenzhen Opened For The First Time Since 2013 appeared first on The Nanfang.

The distribution of villages throughout Shenzhen once afforded opportunities for low capital, small scale businesses to pop up within the urban center. It also meant that workers could find affordable housing within walking distance or short rides to their jobs. In this sense, villages were not simply gateways to the city, but also platforms that gave low-income and working class families economic opportunities that are not available outside the city center.

Ongoing demolition and eviction (拆迁) of villages in Luohu, Futian, and Nanshan are hardening class divisions in Shenzhen; there is a sense in which we don’t need the second line anymore because low-income and working class families can no longer afford to live in the urban center.  The irony, of course, is that we’re suddenly in global conversations about “making” in Shenzhen even as those who actually handle “the production end of things” are being pushed into the outer districts. All this to say, the emphasis on “making” obscures the alienation of workers from Shenzhen’s inner districts and shines uncomfortable light on our own class prejudices.

In Shahe Industrial Park, Baishizhou, which is scheduled for demolition beginning May 1, 2016, for example, the design and office businesses have already left and set up shop elsewhere, their used Keurig pods littering the streets. However, those small businesses that rely on place cling tenaciously. Gas delivery services, automobile detailing, mom and pop retail, and garbage sorting have not yet left and one suspects that they will stay as long as they can, even after the eviction deadline; one day of business is one day of business (过一天算一天).

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The image is from the ongoing “Don’t Raze Baishizhou Photography Exhibition” which meets every Saturday to photography Baishizhou’s residents and garner attention for the call for more equitable redevelopment.

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How have our parents’ and grandparents’, and their parents’ and grandparents’ sojourns–some forced, some voluntary, and some taken on a whim–shaped the people we have become? It is a quintessentially American question, and yet it resonates in Shenzhen where almost everyone of the city’s 20 million people have migrated here from somewhere else. It also resonates because before the establishment of the Special Zone, emigration–rather than immigration, departure rather than arrival–informed family trajectories.  Last night I attended a screening of the documentary film, Finding Samuel Lowe, which is based on Paula Williams Madison’s search for her maternal grandfather, a Hakka who migrated from Lowe Shui Hap (m: Luoruihe 罗瑞合) in Longgang to Kingston, Jamaica to make his fortune. To summarize a riveting and complex story, Finding Samuel Lowe tells how Madison’s search for her grandfather reunited a family dispersed in Guangdong, Jamaica, and Harlem.

In Jamaica, Lowe had two common-law wives, Emma Allison and Madison’s grandmother, Albertha Campbell.Ten years after he arrived in Jamaica, his family also arranged a marriage for him with a hometown girl, Swee Yin Ho, who joined him in Jamaica. When Samuel Lowe returned to Guangdong in 1920, one of Emma Allison’s children, Adassa returned with him, as did Swee Yin Ho and her four children. Emma Allison’s son, Gilbert remained in Jamaica, a member of the extensive Chinese Jamaican community. However, Albertha Campbell broke off contact with Samuel when their daughter, Nell was three years old, and Nell grew up not knowing her father. Nell and her husband migrated from Jamaica to Harlem, and their children, Elrick, Howard, and Paula grew up unaware of their family in Shenzhen until Paula began searching for them in 2012.

The traditional Hakka narrative of emigration is one of necessity. In these stories war and poverty compel people to leave settled homes for places where they can farm, or trade, or go to school, constantly improving their situation for themselves and other members of their family.  Similarly, the American Dream begins in loss. Some of our families were forcibly taken from us. Some of us voluntarily left our families. Most of us have a backup plan to pick up and start again elsewhere–anywhere but here, is so prevalent among Americans as to constitute a mantra. Indeed, Madison’s story illuminates the common desires that launch us beyond “our place” or “where we belong” to make something of ourselves. As Nell told a young Paula, “I didn’t come to America for you to get Bs [in school].” And yet. As we stretch into and are stretched by the unknown who we thought we were transforms as older connections are broken and new attachments formed.

Thought du jour: the prototypical Hakka emigration story (ongoing for a 1,000 years) uncannily portends migrant stories of the American dream; we are defined by what we have lost and our efforts to heal the constant irritation of departures past and immanent.

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88 Bar which always helps me think about technology with Chinese characteristics.

Anna Greenspan’s website that includes links to her publications on technology in both China and India.

Digital China provides the scholarly antidote to chinaSMACK‘s addictive presentation of  the Chinese internet.

Ethnography Matters for great insights into how people think about big data (and how ethnography helps us do that thinking).

Factory Stories is just that, a website about working conditions in the Pearl River Delta.

Hacked Matter, one of the first Western research initiatives into Chinese maker spaces.

Institute for the Future has been delving into the techinological futures of human beings for at least a decade. IFTF researcher (and good friend), Lyn Jeffrey got me interested in the Shenzhen scene!

Silvia Lindtner’s website that includes downloadable PDFs of her wonderful papers on shanzhai production.

That’s What Xu Said provides occasional posts and analysis into what’s going on in Chinese social media.

Tricia Wang’s website is a trove of insight into digital China and connects you to all the great work she does.

There’s more out there. Please let me know so I can update my reading.

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[T]o expose and analyze the discrepancies between this genre of work and ‘conventional’ land art understood in the Western-centric art historical context, thereby probing the potential of ‘land’–as a cultural and political concept–in artistic practice.

The exhibition itself is wonderfully large-scale; where else but China, one might ask, can artists and curators literally dig holes into the concrete floor of their exhibition space? Propitiation by Liu Wei and Colin Chinnery does just that, revealing the layers–soil and bricks and concrete–on which the exhibition stands. Of course, as Li Jinghu noted during the talk, the hierarchical organization of work in China affords this scale of artist praxis. For his piece, Square, Li Jinghu worked with a contractor and a construction team to have the marble flagstones at Dongguan’s central plaza cut into pieces that became the elements of a pyramid. And at OCAT this relatively small pyramid echoes the presence of the Window of the World pyramid, which is also a component of the Overseas Chinese Town portfolio, as well as part of the corporation’s ongoing efforts to use culture to enhance the value of their real estate holdings in post-industrial Shenzhen. (In terms of chronology, theme parks appeared roughly a decade before high art.)

Indeed, each of the pieces in Digging speaks to the ongoing transformation of rural China into the wild, Disney-esque roller coaster of Chinese mega-cities, which have replaced agrarian fields as the unit at which land and people are organized, and have also become the focus of China’s state-led development. In 2014, for example, the state released its “National New-type Urbanization Plan (2014-2020)“, which aims to stimulate the national economy through large-scale urbanization projects. Rural urbanization matters because the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party is tied to the country’s standard of living; Deng Xiaoping initiated Reform and Opening by stating that “poverty is not communism.” Shenzhen has long been the model for China’s experiments in rural urbanization and RMB City, Cao Fei’s contribution to the exploration of what land real estate means reminds us just how ungrounded–yet so thrilling–this rush to a prosperous future (of unlimited consumption) has been. Cao Fei launched the project in 2008 and her Second Life “Beijing” (the key landmarks are all in Beijing) resonates in Shenzhen, the home of Tencent and Huawei as well as Huaqiangbei, the Disneyland of hackers, shanzhai, and electronics start-ups, a place that can turn out new “smart” products faster than anywhere else on the planet.

Against this larger context, where art praxis models itself on construction and urbanization carries the burden of national salvation (or at least the legitimacy of its ruling class), Wang Jianwei’s work from the 1990s presents a world that seems long ago and faraway. Passé,  prosaic, even boring (and boring is not a criticism, but a sign of our hyper urban times; it takes a decision to listen to and watch a farmer discuss and complete the day-to-day chores of growing food), Circulation: Sowing and Harvesting [1993-1994], Production [1996], and Living Elsewhere [1999]seem twice removed from the exhibit. On the one hand, these works locate the viewer in China’s rural interior (neidi), where agrarian production is the only economic option available. Since the start of Reform and Opening, villages located near container ports have opted to collectively industrialize, assembling the tchotchkes and fashions of consumers here and elsewhere in order to bootstrap themselves into a higher income bracket. China’s coastal township and village enterprises were so successful in rural transformation (if not urbanization strictly speaking), researchers have offered TVEs as models for other developing countries seeking to modernize intractable countrysides. On the other hand, Wang Jianwei’s works seem quaintly tu (土), which might be translated as rustic or provincial. They are from a time when it was still possible to imagine farmers and farming as respectable. The work was hard, yes. The work was bitter, often. But. Agriculture–low tech and messy–was once upon a time recognized as contributing value to the nation. Today, the countryside is viewed as a problem to be solved and if Ou Ning is to be believed, the ongoing decline of the Chinese countryside can be reversed through situated art praxis.

The place of farmers and farming in the national imaginary leads me to more philosophical considerations which Digging opens. First and foremost is the question of what “land” is and what can and cannot be capture in translation. On the face of it, “land” is tudi (土地). However, like many words in Chinese, tudi is a composite of two ideograms that have different meanings. Tu refers to something like earth or soil, and when paired with rang(壤) it allows for cultivation. In contrast, di is more explicitly about the social use of earth, and appears in composite words such as land (dipi 地皮) and real estate (dichan 地产). Consequently, in Shenzhen it is possible to say that although there is di, there is a shortage of tu. Telling, one of the colloquial expressions for transforming polders into land is “zaodi(造地, literally produce land)”, while one form of land reclamation is “qitu (弃土, literally dumping earth [into coastal waters])”; in other words, land is always already created, while earth is disposable. This distinction is particularly relevant in Shenzhen where coastal land reclamation of both sorts contributed to the city’s early boom (the scale of the process can be viewed from space). What’s more, when taken together, tudi is not only “land” and all that it implies, but also the name of the local land god. Throughout the Chinese countryside and many of its cities, it is possible to find small shrines to Tudi Gong (土地公) and his wife, Tudi Popo. And the fact that Tudi Gong is male and explicitly linked with agricultural (landed?) prosperity importantly frames the conversations that Digging hopes to stimulate. Tudi–land–might be understood as the conditions and practices that allow for social reproduction. Tudi–land–is always already socialized, at once available for human use and not; Tudi must be appeased and even then he might bestow blessings elsewhere.

In contrast to the pieces in Digging, many of the earth (or land) art that show up in the west might be more closely linked with the recuperation of Gaia, an earth goddess. Indeed, the juxtaposition of Tudi Gong with Gaia suggests a second philosophical consideration for mapping the importance of “land” in diversely situated art praxes. Tudi Gong explicitly evokes rural China and its patrimonial traditions, while Gaia conjures images of hippies and New Age adventures–Mother Nature. Sudden, abrupt cognitive dissonance as land and earth seemingly fly off into different value regimes. Inquiring minds want to know; just what do the works in Digging have in common with such iconic earth artists such as Robert Smithson, Nancy Holt, and Christo? The Digging artists are primarily male and interested in how human beings use and are used by tudi/land and its institutions. Meanwhile, the earth/land artists were primarily U.S. American and interested in calling attention to the potential of something outside human endeavor–nature as having  an intrinsic value which is manifest in unique, usually stunning landscapes without visible human traces (except for the work of art). The Digging artists call our attention to social reproduction. The earth artists drew our gaze to the elusive border that separates society from its nonhuman other.

All this to say that the English title of the exhibition, Digging a Hole in China is growing on me. The Chinese title, Shijian de Dimao (事件的地貌) cites Paul Virlio’s book, A Landscape of Events, focusing our attention on the land-appearance (a literal translation of the compound, 地貌) of events. As I wandered through the exhibition, the Chinese title seemed more appropriate, and frankly less about marketing strategies. However, the English title–its overdetermined and clunky pun, notwithstanding–actually invokes the labor that transforms tu and earth alike into “tudi/land”. At stake is not so much what is seen (or even how it is viewed), but rather the insight (!) that human labor makes tudi/land endlessly productive, even when no longer fertile.

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Qicha Village is located at the heart of the proposed upgrade of Foshan’s Chancheng District. The Municipality purchased all non-housing land from the village and has demolished the surrounding industrial parks. It has started started to upgrade roads into the area and will begin a project to clean up the area’s streams and rivers, especially the Dongping River. Compensation for their land has given villagers enough to purchase nearby houses, but not enough to retire on. Instead, their next livelihood will be managing their individual and collectively held homes, and the commerce that grows up in the first floor of buildings.

For over a year, Foshan Municipality has been promoting community involvement urban planning in Qicha. The head of the project is committed to both modernization (public infrastructure, access to roads, and promotion of culture) and to community involvement in planning the new village. He is working with a Shenzhen firm, Akelan that is trying to develop models of community urban planning for urban villages. Akelan’s team has worked with village teams to develop seven different plans, which are now being debated and will become the basis for making decisions about investment, public space, and solving parking problems and other issues that have suddenly arisen in the absence of access to land.

The Qicha experiment is simultaneously ambitious and meticulous. On the one hand, it aims to provide alternatives to the complete demolition and forced evictions that have been used elsewhere. On the other hand, the Shenzhen firm has invested time and extensive labor into researching the village, working with the Foshan Department of Urban Planning, and bring recalcitrant villagers into the conversation.

Akelan’s director of design addressed villagers during a planning workshop, saying “If we can find a way to change how rural urbanization is handled, we can improve China. Each of your contribution to finding this new way will be written into history.”

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