ABSTRACT
One day in late 2008 in the chengzhongcun (village in the city) of Guanlan, in the northern district of Shenzhen, we took a lunch break and drove out to the edge of the cun (village). In the surrounding area some of the local government speculative property initiatives have included the Guanlan Lake Golf Club Holiday Inn, a spectacular luxury leisure complex.The hotel is next to another local state-backed initiative, Mission Hills Golf Course, which boasts 11 championship golf courses and was until recently host of the annual Omega Mission HillsWorld Cup.A major water-based tourist development of holiday homes, also based on a shiqu (city district) local-government investment vehicle, is just up the road focused around a beautiful lake of diminishing depth and an aspirational green tourism. The logic of urban form in this part of Bao’an district is not straightforwardly
discernible. Landscape moves seamlessly from dense residential blocks to a field of barely visible crops and back to brick, all in the space of a few hundred metres. But after ten minutes drive the land is barren and barely cultivated at all.We talk for a while about where the cun ends. Sherlock Holmes laughs. Sherlock (he used his own ‘English’ nickname for himself ) works for the cun’s management committee. His father had been elected to the committee that month, turning over an old regime in the nascent democratic arrangement of village affairs. He then tells a story about the boundaries of the cun that it is hard to provenance but revealing for its substance and its subtext. At the time of Deng’s ‘reform and opening up’, the villages in the city in Shenzhen and other parts of the south were encouraged to expand autonomously economically.The logic linked to the growth of township and village enterprises in the same decade. Government inspectors had been sent round to turn reform principle into econo-
mic practice, confirming the cartography of local landholdings.The inspection-based
cadastre was to regularise those privileged in the first wave of SEZ exemplified by Shenzhen.Guanlan itself lay outside the ‘collar’ or old boundary (guan nei) that separates inside the special zone (tequ) from outside (guan wai) and is still marked by old, barely used forms of passport and identity control. It sits half way to Dongguan, a city famous for the fierce autonomy of local government that prompted several interventions from Beijing to rein in local government affairs in the 1990s and 2000s. However, its proximity to the growth area meant the village had the potential and the interests in attracting investment in manufacturing and the facility to accommodate the workshops and factories along with the large migrant populations and sweated labour. The border of the village defined the territory for Guanlan’s potential develop-
ment, the geographical limits to the property rights of the village ‘clan’. Before the days of geographic information system (GIS) and satellite technologies, in the wake of the moves to experiment with the growth of Shenzhen, the cadastration process was mapped out by visiting inspectors who stayed as the guests of the village’s committee. Because the precise boundaries of villages in the area owed more to tenure than secure landholdings, legacies of the histories of the late-twentieth century, each cun was to be defined by the limits of its cultivable area. So according to Sherlock, the elders would take the inspector out during the day to formulate the map of the cultivation of a particular lychee tree. After a long lunch and hospitable dinner the inspectors went to sleep at which point a number of local families went out in vans and trucks and dug up the lychee trees in one set of plots and created afresh a new landscape of lychee trees in a different sector of settlement. They moved in turn from north to west to south and east of the village, ensuring on each occasion the cun made a land grab based on the fictitious cultivation of the lychee.And that is why – as Sherlock boasted – the boundaries of the cun are so extensive in comparison with most other villages in the region. The story may be apocryphal but it captures a sense of the balance between
local solidarities and suspicion of central authority, valorises the wit of the local to fool the bureaucrat. The story almost mimics a plot line in Gogol’s nineteenthcentury play ‘The Government Inspector’ that sketches the ambivalence and venality of both central power and local autonomy. It captures the sense in which Guanlan sees itself as a site of potential, the possibility of attracting affluence resting on the authority to develop, transact and leverage the potential of the land. As Helen Siu (2007) puts it in a study of the ‘uncivil urban spaces’ of post-reform China, the focus of the villages has changed in the last 30 years: ‘Their main livelihood, as a villager puts it, has shifted from cultivating crops (gengtian) to cultivating real estate (gengwu)’ (Siu 2007, 331). The story also illustrates how the chengzhongcun has become an iconic urban
form of contemporary China (Zheng et al. 2009). It brings together particular combinations of property rights, urban fabric and migrant demography. The particular assemblage of housing supply and cultural flows allows the city to accommodate simultaneously both extraordinary migration numbers and the dynamics of urban change; to allocate the externalities of demographic change
through a particular configuration of the metropolis.The villages accommodated the massive flows of people into the city but migrant status is conditional and qualified. The costs of sustaining the migrant-driven change (the welfare externalities) are largely displaced back to sending rural districts where frequently children and sometimes wives or (less often) husbands sustain family ties and reproduction at a distance in hometowns (laojia). In this chapter,we explore the manner in which the migrants to the city and built
form come together to create new urbanisms in today’s China. The empirical material draws on an intensive three-month period of research tracing the life histories of migrants to the city of Shenzhen that focused on four of the chengzhongcun. The four locations exemplified very different urban forms. In Guanlan, on the outer periphery of contemporary Shenzhen, the village economy was based significantly on the assembly of electrical manufactured goods. A single corporate venture was based in a large factory, complete with dormitory accommodation for many of its migrant workers.The village had been split in two by a major new road construction and the emergent local politics was similarly divided between the two factions who had just recently fought out control of village management, with those associated with Sherlock’s father on top at the time. In Dafen, the village had famously specialised successfully in oil painting and was now the site of a host of factories that produced production lines of ‘original’ copies of old masters and popular modern art that is exported to the west on a grand scale. In Xiasha, the local economy was moving up the value chain with new employers locating now demanding workers with degree qualifications for their IT-based manufacturing plant.A village that was once seen as particularly lawless and notorious for sex workers and illicit trading was moving upmarket, now more respectable and the site of a form of gentrification, Shenzhen style.And in the final location in Shuiwei the proximity of the border and mass transit links to Hong Kong had driven a process of increasing residential affluence. Built into the bricks and mortar new build of luxury residential apartments blocks and xiaoqu, tenants and residents commuted in labour markets that increasingly linked Hong Kong and Shenzhen as a single travel to work area. In each village (cun), working in collaboration with Shenzhen Academy of
Social Science, over 150 migrants were interviewed about their home place of origin (laojia), their employment, tenure, family structure, work security and expectations of how long they planned to stay in Shenzhen. In each village a full day interview was spent with the committees that controlled the village, the families (or ‘clans’) that ran the villages.Through formalised joint stock companies they exercised several of the conventional property rights of ‘ownership’.Village families were assigned specific plots, developments that were largely rented and sometimes sold to incoming migrants. Each village described the methods through which these joint stock companies and similar institutional forms had been developed – owned by the villagers themselves – to run the affairs of the village. We also returned to Shenzhen two to three times a year over four years
(2008-2012), repeat interviewing 16 senior planners working in the city who described the city’s evolving attitudes, fears and aspirations for the villages.We worked
over the same time with a range of the city’s architectural and private planning practices and companies that had been asked to address the ‘problems’ of the chengzhongcun, which had been stigmatised in much journalistic discussion, paradoxically valorised in some architectural characterisation, but beyond controversy host a significant majority of Shenzhen’s population, a pattern typical of the two major metropolises of Guandong province. In the Pearl River Delta’s two major cities there were 139 urban villages in Guangzhou in 2006 (Hsing 2010) and ‘urban villages in Guangzhou and Shenzhen make up more than, respectively, 20 and 60% of their planned areas providing homes to 80% of migrants in these cities’ (Zhang et al. 2009, 426). The argument of the chapter is that the process of migration generally – and the
material cultures of the urbanisms of the new villages more specifically – provide a powerful lens through which it is possible to understand the relationship between the emergent city, informality, the evolving economy and the new demographies of urban China.There is an organic and paradoxical power to the villages.They have proved to be powerful ‘integration machines’ (Saunders 2010, 2) facilitating the incorporation of migrant numbers into the workings of the new China.Yet this incorporation is conditional, qualified, partial and differential. It reflects and reproduces the legacy of the hukou system in stratifying citizenship rights, even in its residual and reformed working.The flexibility of the urban form is predicated on insecurities of tenure, the fungibility of land use and development rights, the ownership of the land by few, the limited and partial citizenship rights of many, the development interests powerful and the capacity of the city form to evolve extraordinary (Cheng and Selden 1994). Migration to cities in China is the major driver of demographic change but
migration involves complex differences – not just between the skilled (state sanctioned) and unskilled (floating population) but also between wide-ranging matters of geographical scale (proximity) and variegated hukou status. There is a small but increasingly significant international flow of migration to the cities of China (Aiyar 2007; Bertoncelo and Bredeloup 2007; Bodomo 2009; Jing 2003; Le Bail 2009; Lyons et al. 2008), but this is dwarfed by the scale of rural-urban movement. Technically this latter migration is internal (national) rather than international but migrant journeys may range in distance from movements from local counties to a nearby metropolis to migrations that are effectively continental in scale as with the great ‘exporting’ of large numbers of people from Sichuan (Zhang 2001, 2008;Ma and Xiang; 1998; Xiang 2005).Analytically, the theoretical factors central to migration studies internationally are reproduced at the continental scale of China’s ‘civilisation state’. Consequently, although the term is used generically in much journalistic – and
some academic – description, there is no singular ‘floating population’ in China as such,but instead a series of increasingly discrepant status forms of migrant life (Zhang 2001).The nuanced categorisations of formal and informal status, tenure, employment and residence become important here.They reflect the importance of patterns of informality in structuring the cities of the global South (Roy 2004).The ‘migrant urbanisms’ of China also combine objects and cultures, bricks and mortar. Urban
form is not just a tabula rasa shaped by migration flows or a determinant of migration cultures but instead is a synthesis of legal status, individual behaviour, cultural formation and land economy. Material anthropologies of home and belonging are consequently central to the emergent metropolis. And welfare externalities of the new markets are mediated by these migrant urbanisms in ways that distinguish the cities of China from the migration structured metropolis of Europe or the US. In this context, we might contrast the ambivalent sense of the geographies of the
villages in the city in this chapter with the pejorative sensibility found in disapproving characterisation of the chengzhongcun typified in vernacular journalistic description. In one formally sanctioned piece that diagnosed the problems for Shenzhen:
A typical urban village in today’s China has absolutely no planning. The residents used to be farmers but now are mostly landlords and the majority of residents are migrant workers.The streets, if they can be called that, are narrow, dirty and lined with all kinds of small shops selling fake or shoddy merchandise. It’s the birthplace of much of a city’s sweatshops and crime cases. Like bankrupt State-owned enterprises (SOEs), these villages are remnants of the old times, when urban planning was non-existent and suburban farmers scraped a living from growing vegetables and peddling to city slickers. But unlike the SOEs, few solutions have worked. If you demolish them without proper compensation, there will be unrest
among the residents. If you pay market price, the cost will be prohibitive since urbanisation has driven them into prime real estate.And since municipal governments can hardly afford the job, they'll hand it over to developers, who can be unscrupulous and ruthless in kicking out the original residents. In cities like Shenzhen or Guangzhou, the housing complexes villagers built have such narrow passageways that only one bike can go through them. Stairways are dark all day long and corridors are cramped and piled with all sorts of junk. Fire hazards are everywhere and there’s little chance a fire truck could get close. Suddenly awash with easy money, some of these landowners and sellers have turned to business ventures, but stories of gambling and drug binges also abound. A distant relative of mine died of overdose while squandering his ‘land money’ on drugs. Some of his old neighbours are still spending their entire days on mahjong games. Desperate for a way out, some cities have turned to consultants fromWestern countries. Surprisingly, these experts say, ‘Don’t change a thing’. This is how people live and interact. It reflects a lifestyle that should be respected… So, are ‘urban villages’ a cultural heritage or an eyesore? They are not on
anyone’s tourist routes, and the renting public inside them don’t live there because they like to, but because they cannot afford a better place.Would a Western consultant say, ‘Don’t clean up a slum because gentrification will change the way people interact?’ Probably not.Allow me to be blunt: these ‘urban villages’ are virtual slums.
