Smash The Old World, Build The New (2)

Author: Samuel Massie

Previously, Smash The Old World, Build The New (1)

Deeper inside the village, we passed a building that looked like a temple. But instead of Budd has and incense, we found mahjong tables.  Groups of four people shuffled around the tiles, in total concentration, while other people stood and watched, and nobody seemed to notice the two foreigners walk in.  Old men lounged around in their undershirts, some chatting, but mostly just staring off into space saying nothing. When I tried to speak Mandarin to them, the national language, they could only respond in the local Cantonese.

          These guys were the old-timers who had spent their entire lives in Xintang Village.  While the vendors in the market had migrated from distant Hunan and Guangxi, the old men, their Cantonese, and their meeting hall represented an unbroken lineage that went back for centuries.  Long before the factories, tenements, and Science City, there had been Xintang and its meeting hall. I had arrived just in time to see the end of both.  It was like picking up a novel and finding the pages blank except for the last sentence of the last paragraph of the last chapter.

A 90-year old man in his home in Xintang, Guangzhou. His neighborhood is awaiting demolition but he refuses to leave. Photography by Steve Bromberg.

          By now, the sun had set, and it was completely dark outside.  Past the market, past the common hall, we had now penetrated the deepest part of the village, where the streets were so narrow you could stand in the middle and touch both sides, and where the knot of tenements blocked out even the sky and the noise from the highway.  And then the tenements stopped, and we heard music.

          In the square ahead of us, the women were having a dance party: dozens of them, decked out in heels, waving their arms and dancing in a well-rehearsed line. Some ingenious person had built a DIY boom box out of wires and old electronics bolted to a dolly, and a self-elected DJ served up Chinese, American, and Indian pop songs.  The men just sat around smoking cigarettes.  But every few songs, a cha-cha or a waltz would play, and then the men would jump up too, grab their wives, and whirl away until the next song started; then the men would sit down and light another cigarette.

          Steve lifted his camera to take a shot, but a pack of shirtless little boys ran over shouting “Take my picture!” “No, take mine!”  They climbed over each other, making the universal Asian peace sign, and all tried to make the biggest, goofiest smile.  Steve and I handed out Double Happiness brand cigarettes to the men, while a curious girl still in her factory uniform tried to guess our nationality, and her auntie told me to get a Chinese wife.

          No cover charge, no dress code, no alcohol.  Whoever wanted to dance, danced; whoever wanted to smoke, smoked, and everyone was just having a good time. But a free dance party has no market value, so the square will become dirt just like the market, the hall, and the tenements. The 30-story condos will come, GDP will grow, but will the new neighbors dance together?  Will they even know each other?

Women shopping for fruit at the Xintang Farmers’ Market, Guangzhou.
Photography by Steve Bromberg.

          The rest of the village – Phase 2 – had already died, but the houses remained behind like rotting corpses.   All the windows had been smashed, all the doors torn down, so only the shells were left.  Garbage and broken glass flowed onto the street. A few notices, hand-painted on walls warned people to avoid certain streets and obey the law.

          I had seen this place before… where?  In photos of Stalingrad from World War II, and photos of Fukushima after the 2011tsunami.We kept walking past more house-corpses, past streets filled with the detritus of human lives: shoes, suitcases, sofas, littered everywhere.  The whole place felt oppressively still and damp. There was nothing living except a few mosquitoes that bit my ankles, and some saplings sprouting through the floors of abandoned houses.

          Finally, in the deepest back alley of Phase 2, we found an old brick house with a peaked room—an ancient farmhouse left behind among the tenements. Inside was an old man.

          We talked, and he told us he was born in Xintang and had lived here his entire life.  We asked him where his neighbors had gone.

          “Oh, all over.  They’ll be relocated to other villages.  They’ll scatter.  But not me, I’m staying right here!”

          “But what if the police come?”

          “I’ve been here for 90 years,” he said simply. “I’d rather die than leave this place.”

A suitcase lies by an abandoned home awaiting demolition in Xintang, Guangzhou.
Photography by Steve Bromberg.

          Xintang perfectly reveals the meaning of Science City.  It is the early 20^thcentury science of economic central planning, coupled with the 19^th century science of Darwinian natural selection. It destroys things that can’t be measured, and replaces them with things that can.  That’s why a town that houses an exuberant market, an ancient meeting hall, dance parties every night, and an old man’s home, not to mention tens of thousands of locals and migrant laborers—will be replaced by GDP, job creation, and 500,000square feet of residential space.  An enlightened central planner and decided that 30,000 people must leave, and they will; for his contribution to municipal GDP, he will be rewarded with a fair share of the revenues from the land sale, and perhaps even a promotion.

          Beyond this enlightened self-interest, however, there also a sincere desire to remake China into something developed and Scientific, something than can hold its own among the developed countries of the world.  The city government desperately wants Guangzhou to present a high-tech, modern face to the West.  How can you have a Science City with a slum sitting at the entrance?

          Benefits for a few, costs for many. Gains that can be measured, losses that can’t. GDP grows, and non-GDP shrinks. Xintang Village doesn’t compute in the great social welfare equation.

          “No, they shouldn’t demolish that village,” said the taxi driver.  “They’ve completely ignored the common people.  It’s just a Face Project, to make everything look pretty, you know?”

          To make conversation, I blabbered that in the US, it was hard to build anything at all because property rights were so strong, and at least China could build things easily.

          He sat quiet for a moment.  “They shouldn’t demolish the village,” he said.

 (The End…)

Written in July 2011

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The link of this article: Smash the Old World, Build the New (2)