By Andy
Via Evan, I recently became acquainted with an article by Peter Hessler from the June 2007 issue of National Geographic titled China’s Instant Cities and an accompanying set of photos by Mark Leong. In the piece, which is highly reminiscent of what we are trying to do with our trip but written with the benefit of extensive amounts of time spent with the people he interviews, Hessler writes about one of China’s numerous, newly created industrial zones.
The story, which Hessler writes primarily from the perspective of a factory manufacturing bra rings in the boom town of Lishui, Zhejiang, touches on many of the themes that have been evolving throughout our own trip, most notably the frantic rush for development at the cost of quality, aesthetics, culture and just about any other positive concept you can think of. The story’s subheading rings particularly true:
China is in the fast lane, ignoring every speed limit. Cities spread like a cartographic contagion.
As we’ve traveled south from Beijing, we’ve seen China’s cities, and really development in general, ravish and scar the very yellow earth that spawned one of the world’s great civilizations. Given the single prerequisite of a piece of relatively flat land, gray, dusty megalopolises will spring forth from the earth in patches of utter chaos like cancerous growths on the vital organs of the body. Hessler writes about the local government’s expansion plans for the Lishui industrial zone, touching on the common modern Chinese theme of relocating entire towns and villages to make room for new development or a hydroelectric dam. We’ve come across this ourselves recently when instead of a road winding into the mountains outside of Anji and a number of quaint little villages as our maps had suggested, we found a huge reservoir below which sat dozens of rows of faceless, nameless and soulless apartment buildings to which the area’s residents had been relocated, with only the submerged town’s name and a handful of aging residents remaining to carry on the culture of that valley among bamboo-covered hills:
That fall, Lishui applied to add another 13.5 square miles (35 square kilometers) to the development zone. The expansion would require an investment of almost 900 million dollars, most of which would come from bank loans. They planned to double the city’s population by 2020. With energy demands rising, the Tankeng Dam was being constructed in the mountains south of Lishui. In preparation, 50,000 people were being relocated from 10 towns and 80 villages. I had watched the final evacuation of Beishan, the largest town, on October 25 of 2005—an auspicious date according to the feng shui experts. There were good days for everything, even abandoning your hometown. Families packed flatbed trucks full of furniture; they unloaded in eight new resettlement communities that had yet to be finished. In Youzhou, Chen Qiaomei told me she’d had trouble finding her apartment, which had no windows yet. “They all look the same!” she said.
Other passages touch on China’s apparent need to constantly prove dominance over nature and remake it to suit the needs of development:
When I talked about Lishui’s factory zone expansion plans with Director Wang, he acknowledged that approval for such projects was becoming more difficult. The central government feared a real estate bubble, but he remained confident. “We’re applying to develop an area where the land isn’t good for farming,” he explained.
On his office wall hung a map of the proposed expansion—future roads, industrial blocks, waterworks. “We’ll have to move more than 400 mountains and hills,” he said.
In the story’s final sentences I see reflected my own dissatisfaction with China’s unlivable, inhuman cities — places suitable to be inhabited only by machines or their equally mindless organic equivalents who scurry frantically and ceaselessly toward that vague goal of “development:”
A cold wind blew against the windows. Outside, I heard neighboring plants—the rattle of glassmaking, the rumble of plastic molds, the pneumatic hiss of water heaters being produced. But there wasn’t a single human sound, only the silent voices on the walls of the abandoned factory.
As with Hessler’s other work, including River Town, Oracle Bones and any number of stories in the New Yorker and National Geographic, China’s Instant Cities is eloquently written and touching in the way it brings the reader closer to the lives and experiences of China’s commoners. Despite our plans to spend a year on the road for Portrait of an LBX, I constantly feel like we are just barely scratching the surface. It’s great to see someone digging a little deeper to tell the stories of China’s common people and effectively placing them within the context of the mind-bogglingly chaotic system under which they must make their lives.
