Ape Rifle

If there is someone I feel sorry for right now, it’s Zhang Zuoji, the governor of Heilongjiang province.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve likely heard all about the chemical spill in the Songhua river and the resulting shutdown of Harbin’s water distribution system. Given the worldwide publicity this little incident has received, our favourite cadres at all bureaucratic levels have been tripping over themselves to 1) blame someone else and 2) make sure this doesn’t turn into yet the latest opportunity for Western media to question the Party’s ability to keep a lid on things. Therefore, the simple fact that the water has been turned back on is grounds for major, propagandic celebration. It signals loud and clear that 1) the government, obviously concerned with its imag…uhh, I mean its citizens, has addressed the situation and that 2) if the water is back on, it must be safe to use. Of course, this also offers the opportunity for some major ‘look how close the Party is to the masses’ photo shoots.

Enter Zhang Zuoji. And why I feel so sorry for him.

I guess it was inevitable. Someone had to pay for the major international embarassment that the Harbin incident has brought. And that someone, apparently, is Zhang Zuoji. Our unfortunate governor has, to appease the gods of propaganda, had to demonstrate his confidence in the situation’s resolution by sampling the newly turned-back-on water. Straight from the tap.

Taking a hit for the team (photo from Xinhua)

More kick than bai jiu! (photo from Xinhua)

I don’t know about you, but in my opinion drinking directly out of a tap in China doesn’t need a chemical spill to be a deadly activity. Ok, so that huge toxic slick has passed Harbin by- but what about the regular deluge of toxins, waste and untreated sewage that is in all probability fed into the river (and the water supply) on a mundane, daily basis? I pray that, for Zhang Zuoji’s sake, his photo appearance was a staged fraud involving bottled water. Otherwise, we should all offer our best as he recovers in the hospital. All joking aside, the Harbin incident raises some rather ominous questions regarding the environment and development in China, the most obvious being: have any lessons been learned? Is this finally going to be a genuine wake-up call?

My cynical guess is, probably not. The chemical spill has created a huge stir, and some local officials will likely be woken from their drunken stupors long enough to have their heads publicly rolled by Beijing. However, after the publicity dies down things will go back to normal, corners will continue to be cut and toxins will continue to be dumped (albeit at a level that doesn’t result in international media attention). There is just too much money and too many promotions at stake to give more than lip service to environmental concerns. Major incidents like this are hardly an environmental wake-up call: it’s been painfully obvious to anyone and everyone that China’s environment has been an absolute mess for years now. I knew that the first night I arrived in the country back in 2002. I remember getting my first breath of Jinan air- after regaining consciousness, I asked my host if there had been a forest fire, or perhaps an industrial accident, nearby. His look of genuine puzzlement at my query told me, right then and there, all I needed to know.

I guess the sad part of the story is that it takes potential embarassment of the country on the international stage for officials to feign any sort of concern for the health of their precious masses. In all honesty, the main reason I can’t imagining myself building any sort of life in China at the moment, as much as I am absolutely fascinated by the place, is the dismal quality of the environment. Seeing farms crops being harvested while they are liberally sprinkled in crap spewing from the smokestacks of an adjacent chemical complex, I have to wonder: what sort of toxins am I ingesting on a daily basis? Holding my nose at the hundreds of black, putrid canals clogged in garbage, I have to wonder: can boiling the water really get rid of that much crap? And I smile quietly at amazement in others that the Chinese can destroy their lungs so thoroughly by smoking, and their livers so thoroughly by drinking: I figure if it’s going to happen anyways, you might as well have fun doing it.

Of course, as a Canadian in China, I was fortunate enough to have the chance to choose whether I wanted to live under such environmentally dismal conditions. I would be lying if I said my decision to leave China wasn’t partly based on serious concerns for what I was doing to my health.

Unfortunately, I know of more than a billion people who do not have that choice.

A few weeks ago, I was in Europe (well, I was also in Europe again last week, but that’s a whole other story). I had a job interview lasting two hours in London which necessitated me going there for the day from Brussels by train. That was an exhausting day.

Soon after, I was asked if I could delay my flight home to Canada and come back to London for a second interview. I did just that, taking a train in from Paris for another two hours of interview, staying overnight, and then taking the train back to Paris the next morning to catch my flight. That was a really exhausting day.

I was really hopeful about the job, they seemed very interested and it fit both my qualifications and personal interests very well. It would have been a fascinating job in a great city with good pay in a major, respected multinational company. I kept my fingers crossed, and yet the hardened cynic in me held on tenaciously, warning the rest of me against getting too optimistic.

It seems my cynicism took the day on that one. I won’t be going to London for that job after all. Back to square one on that front.

Deciding I needed to spend some quality time with my girlfriend while I still had the money and energy, I went back to Belgium last week to be a good person and caring companion. It was a very nice and relaxing week, despite being informed that I didn’t get the London job in the midst of it. I didn’t let it get me down, I have a lot going for me and I’m motivated to pursue a fulfilling career in my field.

Upon my return to Canada the other day, however, the border agents decided they wanted to spend some quality time with me and dampen a bit of that positive energy. Apparently, visiting a girlfriend in Europe while ‘unemployed’ (c’mon, I just finished my Masters barely two months ago, and I haven’t even officially graduated yet) allows one the opportunity to be ‘interviewed’ for an hour, have all one’s bags thoroughly searched, get frisked against a wall and be thoroughly intimidated. It’s kind of scary how a few people in uniform can so easily crush your dignity for no reason you are aware of. If there’s a law against being well-traveled, no one told me about it.

I got my marks, and I passed with distinction, something I should be (and am) quite proud of. So there you have it, I now have a Masters degree from the London School of Economics. And yet at 25, I find myself nearly broke and back in the old family home. Oh well, the Dandy Warhols are in town next weekend and I can, at least, still afford a ticket to that.

For some reason, many people in China (both locals and expats) can’t see to inhabit that comfy middle ground when it comes to discussing the nation’s two largest cities. Beijing is often decried as ‘too political’ or ‘too conservative’, while Shanghai gets slandered as ’soulless’ and ‘too superficial’. The dreary concrete jungle of the former is cherished by some, while others swear on the gaudy faux-glitz of the latter. It’s either Beijing or Shanghai, the traffic jams or the princesses.

I will admit right now that I’m a bonafide Beijing kind of guy. Sure, for the most part it’s a horrible concrete jungle, but that is a pretty weak charge when discussing Chinese cities (as if Shanghai isn’t??). Sure, it gives new meaning to the word showcase, but then again that is what national capitals are supposed to be: centres of empire are not shoddy slums. Being somewhat partial to the lands north of the Chang Jiang, I find Beijing to have that certain northern Chinese je ne sais quoi, not to mention some outstanding neighbourhoods. Beijing, despite its shortcomings, lives and breathes genuine city, while I find Shanghai to be little more than a collection of trophy skyscrapers. But that’s just me: I know many people who prefer Shanghai, and that’s their business. I’m just not one of them.

Both cities have firmly entrenched themselves in modern Chinese lore as specific ‘functional’ places: Beijing is a political and cultural centre while Shanghai takes care of business. Shanghai is the king of capitalism, the mecca of banks and finance, the home of free-wheeling entrepreneurship. Beijing, on the other hand, has the grandiose historical sites, the monumental offices of state and a lot of very big boulevards with sweeping views of other boulevards. So, imagine my surprise this summer when I came across an article by some researchers in Hong Kong predicting that Beijing, not Shanghai, would ultimately become the nation’s premier financial centre. Uhmm, what?

Yes, I know. At first, it sounds absolutely absurd. The Olympics? Sure. High technology? Why not. But international financial services? That’s going a little too far. Everyone knows that Shanghai is already the country’s financial centre. After all, what is Lujiazui over in Pudong supposed to be? Beijing is about affairs of state, while Shanghai is about money.

Or is it? In Determining Factors of the Development of a National Financial Center: The Case of China, Simon Zhao, Li Zhang and Danny Wang argue that, given the current nature of China’s economic system, Beijing is the location more like to see a significant agglomeration of international financial and corporate services. It’s quite simple, really: given the heavy state presence in nearly all areas of the Chinese economy, an essential business strategy for big international players is to be connected into the national bureaucracy and regulatory commissions. The Chinese politico-economic system, they argue, is ripe with “information asymmetry”, in which the regulators (state bodies) have much more information than the regulated (foreign financial firms, corporations, etc.). In other words, given the fluid nature of the Chinese political/commercial environment, in which ‘laws’ are constantly re-interpreted, contradicted and arbitrarily ignored or enforced, an industry like financial services, which is pretty dependent on regulatory information, can hardly rely on any ’standardized’ procedure. It necessitates close connection to the machinations of the political world.

Therefore, in this type of environment, it makes sense for major financial and corporate players to cluster around the major national decision-making powers of Beijing rather than the important, but regional, industrial centre of Shanghai. The latter, although heavily promoted by the central government throughout the 1990s as China’s financial hub, does not have national administrative functions. As much as Shanghai is about business, it is missing the crucial attraction of central political connectivity, seen as essential in China’s business environment. This seems all the more relevant considering that much of the favour lavished on Shanghai was due to the “Shanghai clique” of Jiang Zemin rising to power in Beijing and funneling national resources into their coastal baby. With the changing of the guard at the national leadership level over the past few years, there are certainly signs that this preferential treatment shown to Shanghai is waning.

Of course, the authors do not ignore the importance of Shanghai within the Chinese economy. It continues to be a major industrial force, and will likely become an important centre of financial and corporate activity given its geographic centrality and driving role in the Chang Jiang delta region. Zhao et al. are careful to note, however, that as big and important as Shanghai is, it will not necessarily become the international financial nerve centre of the country. Given the current nature of the Chinese system, in which politics, bureaucracy and economic decision-making are inseparable, the financial industry will gravitate towards Beijing to hook into vital policy-making ebbs and flows.

I guess the common mistake we often make is to assume that China will have a ‘Washington’ and a ‘New York’, separate political and financial nerve centres. But when you think about China’s bastard child economic system, in which a monopoly state itself is the major player in the business environment, then it only makes sense that the political and financial hubs converge into a single location. In the end, we make the mistake of buying into the liberal economic theory that politics and business are largely separate spheres: this line of thinking is suspect at best in most Western states, and quite simply absurd in a place like China.

Personally, I find it sort of funny that the circumstances pushing Shanghai as the international financial hub of China, that is the stubborn determination of the central Chinese state to control, direct and interfere in economic development, are perhaps the very ones that will ultimately drive major financial players to Beijing instead.

Sometimes, when one has travelled a little too much in a short period of time, things and places have a tendency to blur into mundane conformity. Airports, buses, train stations, public transportation, highways, hotels- they are all the same, right? In many ways they are, and for that you can blame a select group of transnational firms and star architects who just can’t stop pumping out near-identical buildings the world over. Paris? Beijing? Doesn’t matter, make that terminal huge, white and cavernous.

I admit that, in moments of fatigue and weakness, I subscribe to this view, as evidenced by my earlier post Universal Place. I surrender my critical faculties and lap up the rhetoric surrounding globalization, in which we are told the world is become smaller, more homogenous and, ultimately, more ‘Western’. This approach seems particularly popular in the realm of contemporary urban studies; during my recent studies of urbanization and development in London, I was subjected to a virtual onslaught of theorists trumpeting the rise of a ’single, global urban discourse’ and the ‘global’ city. Urban areas the world over, despite an immense diversity in historical, cultural and politico-economic circumstances, are increasing growing, changing and looking the same. Global economics is killing off the culture of difference, slowly but surely, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the growth of similar urban forms.

This viewpoint has, similarly, permeated the popular press as well. While some write in awe of the rise of ‘Western’ skyscrapers and ‘modern’ highways in the mega-cities of the developing world, others lament the destruction of local culture to make way for the generic landscapes of mega-malls, office parks and high-rise condominiums. Cities cease to be actual places and become, rather, global spaces. They are landscapes of glistening hotels, elevated highways, endless sprawl and mass consumption. They juxtapose ‘global’ office districts with desperate slums, hypermarket consumerism with age-old agriculture. And yes, it is in these cities that luxury sedans drive over the homeless (or migrant workers on bikes, if you are writing about Asia).

I can understand the temptation of assuming that the world is increasing witnessing a single, ‘global’ urban form. Most cities over a certain size are experiencing similar problems: runaway sprawl, horrendous traffic congestion, drastic wealth gaps and serious environmental quality issues. The ‘haves’, used to having their way (no pun intended), are busily constructing their glistening world above and beyond the heads of the ‘have nots’, with the latter left to rot in crumbling housing projects, megaslums or a rapidly deteriorating rural environment. So, if cities the world over are experiencing similar problems, it must mean they are similar, right?

Well no, not really. In fact, these problems stem more often than not from a belief in the similarity of cities rather than any actual similarity in their form, function or organization. If, in terms of urban development, one believes in a ‘one size fits all’ approach, then the tendency will be to apply the same solution to perceived similar situations. This is the “if it works in New York, it works in Shanghai” approach. This is the world of fact-finding missions, airport-hopping consultants and ‘best practices’, in which ‘what worked over there must be done over here’. Whether your traffic problem is in Istanbul, Beijing or Toronto, well it’s nothing a little ‘modern’ urban transportation modelling can’t handle. The problem with all this, of course, is that what excels in one particular, and very specific, context may well fail dismally in another. Cities are cities, yes, but they are also each a unique product of their particular social, cultural and historical circumstances. There is no law that says what works in one place most work in another. And given huge, and persisting, diversity in the cultural sphere, this scepticism of the universal becomes all the more vital.

If we do not get beyond this idea that cities are increasingly the same, I fear we will do nothing but make them worse places to live for their inhabitants. I guess, as humans, we have a tendency to get caught up on superficial appearances, and an inability to move beyond these is ultimately what drives the ‘globalization’ rhetoric. So we see tall buildings, we see highways, we see malls, and we think: these places are the same. But digging just a tiny bit deeper, one finds that the dynamics driving these places could not be more different. Thus, public transportation initiatives in one particular city might work not because they are objectively ‘good’, but rather because they are particularly suited to that city’s socio-cultural environment. Similarly, these same solutions might fail dismally in another city where public transportation is frowned upon as being ‘for the peasants’. Although North American cities have mostly managed (so far) to function as car dependent entities, any sane individual would tell you this is just not an option in mainland China, where even minuscule car ownership rates means more vehicles on the sidewalks than pedestrians. In the end, I guess, we have to remember that difference still matters. Shanghai is not New York, and New York is certainly not London nor is it Lagos. They might all be ‘big’ and ‘important’, yes, but why they have developed and, more importantly, how they have developed could not be more different. And the unique path each has taken will necessarily affect the method through which problems are tackled and solved.

We have a tendency, here in the good old ‘West’, to see homogeneity where there is none, to find comfort in an erroneous belief that the ‘Other’ is becoming more like us, and thus less threatening. We like to see globalization, Westernization and modernization in situations where perhaps these are not the best explanations for what’s going on. Shanghai, for example, is often trumpeted as China’s New York, evidence that the Middle Kingdom is embracing ‘Western’ market capitalism, brash consumerism and tall shiny things. However, look beyond the glossy exterior (which, unfortunately, most people don’t), and the dynamics driving the development of China’s biggest city could not be more different from the Big Apple. Numerous times in the past few years, I have read that Pudong is China’s ‘Manhattan’. That’s strange, I guess I missed the part where the East Village was an explicitly planned, government-driven mega-project. Besides the height of certain buildings, I sure don’t see much in common.

Manhattan

Pudong, China’s ‘Manhattan’

Update: As Pketh has rightly pointed out in the comments section, I certainly could have taken a picture in Shanghai that looks very similar to the New York scene. My point, however, was to show that Pudong, which is regularly called China’s ‘Manhattan’, is nothing like Manhattan at all. I’ve changed the photo captions to make that comparison more explicit.

Sitting near me on the Eurostar train from Brussels to London, a Belgian family chatters away about their upcoming arrival in the United Kingdom. From the sounds of it, this is the first trip to the British Isles for several of them, in particular the little boy. As the train emerges from the Chunnel onto British soil under a (surprisingly) blue sky, he jumps excitedly at the window to catch a glimpse of this wondrous foreign land. Surveying the landscape of rail infrastructure and beyond, he exclaims, with obvious disappointment, “It looks exactly the same!”.

And I can’t say I blame him. Sometimes it really does.

Sitting in front of me on the Eurostar train from London to Paris, two British men discuss, at length, the DVD projects they are developing for their company. Not particularly paying attention, I instead stare out the window at suburban Paris. Before my eyes passes a world of wires, rails and ugly apartment blocks, the monotony broken only by the pervasive graffiti covering every surface unfortunate enough to face the tracks. Tall, colourless buildings litter the landscape, very obviously built in the 1970s before aesthetics were invented. This could really be anywhere in Europe, I think to myself. Change some of the advertised brand names and pay a little less attention, and it could easily be a North American city. Add a lot more buildings, trash on the tracks and heavy smog, and you are looking at China.

When did everything start looking so similar, I wondered.

The other day, I was on the Metro here in Montreal on my way to a photo exhibition. As I tried my best to observe the people around me while explicitly not doing so, I got a very strange sensation. I could have been absolutely anywhere. The faces I saw, I had seen on the Metro in Paris. The fatigue and the blank stares, I had seen on the subway in New York. The harried post-9-to-5 look, well I had definitely seen that on the tube in London. The Asian students, the gangbangers, the veiled women, the businessmen, I had all seen them before. I just couldn’t get over it: this underground metro car could have been anywhere in the Western world. Absolutely anywhere. Sure the maps have different lines, the seats might face in different directions and the trains have different shapes. But I was no longer specifically in Montreal. I was just on a generic Western underground transportation system.

I was just another generic face.

As I sat in Paris-Charles De Gaulle the other day, waiting for my flight to Montreal, I took in my surroundings while fighting hard against sleep. Terminal 2F was a cavernous affair, a world of glass and shiny white. The boarding gates went off into the distance, ready to lift people off to their respective corners of the world. Blue signs with arrows told people where to go. Big screens blared information at us all. Mainland Chinese tourists noisily made their way by, burdened with the bags of the duty free they had just plundered. I got to thinking: change the language on the signs, remove some of the very French-looking Police Nationale officers, and this could have been anywhere in the world. Major international airports are the ultimate space with no place: they all do the same thing, get designed by the same few architects, and offer the same global consumer experience (albeit perhaps with a slight variation in brand names).

Welcome to Planet Generica.

Over the past month, I’ve defied my supposed return ‘home’ by ending up in New York, Ottawa, Paris, Brussels and London. It’s been a world of highways and trains, anonymous terminals and passport controls. I’ve had coat pockets burdened with the coinage of three different currencies, a wallet confused by the nationality of the bank notes within. A backpack stuffed with receipts, boarding passes, bus tickets, withdrawal slips and reservations, some in English and others in French. A few of the really crumpled ones are even in Turkish and Chinese, forgotten relics from travels past. My watch is six hours behind my cell phone, neither telling me what the time is where I currently am. The New York subways grinds into the station, and I’m getting out in the City of London. The RER pulls out of Gare du Nord in Paris- or was it Gare du Midi in Brussels? Regardless, I know that my stop is Place-des-Arts in Montreal. That’s where the Canadian Parliament buildings are.

Ours is an urban world of honking traffic, glass towers, trendy neighbourhoods, metro systems and ubiquitous coffee shops. The miracle of flight shuttles us from a place where you can get Lays potato chips to a place where you can get Walkers crisps instead. You can pay for that latte in dollars, pounds or euros. No one cares. The cars might drive on the left instead of the right, but they are still cars, made by the same companies.

Somewhere in the world, there must be a city factory. This factory produces a basic ‘urban area’ model, and it certainly is popular. It’s a model with ring roads and highrises, sprawling suburbs and gentrifying inner cities. It’s a model with shopping malls and modernist glass boxes. Major roads even come included with generic road signs and traffic jams. Office towers sit quietly, waiting for logos to appear on their top floors. Trendy locals are sprinkled liberally throughout the map, waiting to be programmed in the appropriate language, as are the masses of immigrant labour. It’s a model that promises “originality, edge and urban hip” in its sales brochure, while offering a numbing sameness in its actual product.

Upon receipt, all the respective nation has to do is fill in the signage with their own language, their own corporate logos, and maybe paint a few things in a colour they like. Voila, the universal city, available now for any culture or creed.

Next Post: Unique Place (or why what I just wrote is wrong)