Once again, the sidewalk digging season is upon us. This urban Chinese rite involves the massive undertaking of digging up and re-tiling/paving/stoning significant sections of a city’s pedestrian paths.
When I first arrived in Hangzhou, it was to the chaos of major downtown streets being “re-fitted” for the coming National Day holiday. The great armies of migrant labour had torn up huge stretches of sidewalk all through the center of the city, and the streets were absolute chaos as the hordes of pedestrians were forced on the roads to mingle with the hordes of cars and bikes. Things calmed down during the fall and winter, but seem to be gearing up again with an influx of army fatigues, straw hats and wheelbarrows.
Before sidewalk digging season commences, we all get fair warning: stacks of tiles, bricks and stones starting appearing every few hundred feet along major thoroughfares. This is to signal that, before long, workers will be dismantling your local sidewalk with a pick axe.
These throngs of rural labourers are then faced with an important choice: should I stare at the big-nosed freak trying to navigate the chopped up road, or should I give my attention to the hopelessly attractive urban princess strutting by? For good reason, the local diva usually wins, giving the foreigners the chance to stumble through the rubble relatively unnoticed. Unless he or she trips, then it is open season.
Many of the sites being worked on are the same ones that received facelifts just months ago. Chinese sidewalks just don’t last long. These workers seem to be perpetually building/re-building the same stretch.
Some might say it is because of shoddy engineering/workmanship. In some cases, this is true. At my old workplace, workers spent months building a nice tiled sidewalk only to have it completely collapse after the first rain storm.
But I would say it is ,instead, mostly well-planned obsolescence: durability is a luxury China can not often afford. If you build your sidewalks to last, what are you going to do with hundreds of millions of rural labourers? Better to have them do redundant work than stir up shit in the countryside. A similar logic seems to apply in many sectors, especially real estate. If construction of a big apartment complex require hundreds if not thousands of workers, does it really matter if it ends up empty upon completion? When you are trying to manage 1.3 billion people, you have better things to worry about.
In the end, I think the traffic inconvenience is well worth keeping all these people busy and employed. Some people might bitch about the constant noise and dust, but think about it this way: better to have the workers laying the stone slabs down than throwing them at you.