Construction Update!

Miles and miles of new construction ring Hohhot. This particular construction district, which is about two miles from Shi Da, goes on for miles. No picture can adequately convey the scale of new construction in the city.

This week in my classes we were talking about the past, present, and the future (tenses, that is). There is a conversation in the chapter (“This Neighborhood has Changed!”) where Matt and Tanya go home to see the vast changes that have transformed their old neighborhood. Matt and Tanya see “a construction site on every corner.” The “little grocery store” where they used to buy candy is now a “multiplex cinema.” A new shopping mall is being built where their high school used to stand. “Soon,” laments Tanya, “there will be just malls and parking lots.” “That’s because everyone has a car!” exclaims Matt. “Fifty years ago, people walked everywhere. Nowadays, they drive.”

Yes, it could be anywhere in the world—but I’m betting that Matt and Tanya grew up in Hohhot (and yes, there is a new multiplex cinema here). My students understand viscerally the changes that Matt and Tanya witness in their old neighborhood. When I asked them if their neighborhoods are changing, they gave me a list of changes that sounded familiar: new stores, more cars, paved streets. One of my students said that his neighborhood no longer exists—everyone has moved to the city.

Miles of nice new apartments like these are sprouting up amid the farms on the edge of the city.

What was so fascinating was that when their text asked the students to gauge whether “things have changed for better or for worse” in Matt and Tanya’s neighborhood, EVERYONE said “for better.” The authors of the text are far more nostalgic: they give the correct answer as simply “for worse.” From the first-world perspective of the textbook, such changes are shocking—neighborhood grocery stores changed into cinemas and schools into shopping malls. For my students, this sounded like progress, including the fact that people now drove everywhere instead of walking.

This entire neighborhood—only about a mile from Shi Da—was just being built when we moved here in the summer. The construction is not yet complete, but new shops are taking residence in new storefronts. At the far end of the street, you see shiny new luxury apartments still under construction.

Allen Greenspan and other cheerleaders for free market capitalism (neo-liberals) talk about capitalism as “creative destruction.” As societies embrace the market, older ways of living are destroyed but the process (in their view) is ultimately creative and desirable. New wealth generated from the “destruction” of traditional livelihoods, they argue, will lift the global masses out of poverty. I don’t endorse this view. Destruction may be wonderful for those benefiting most from the transition, but it’s pretty brutal for those who are displaced. But my students’ response would have warmed Greenspan’s heart. For them, China’s transformation to a market society is daunting but largely positive. Of course, they are also from China’s new middle-class. One of my students, Leon, comes from Wuhai, a gritty industrial town of 500,000 on the Yellow River. His family is among the Chinese nouveau riche. His father is a train engineer, but his mother speculates on the Shanghai stock market. Her luck has made the family’s fortune in the last five years, allowing Leon to come to university in Hohhot.

New construction shrouded in green mesh can be seen on almost every block. This one is on the “Second Circle Road” just about one mile south of Shi Da.

By most accounts, China is in the midst of a dramatic period of change and modernization. Some question whether China’s yearly 10% GDP growth is partly the product of fudged numbers: maybe Beijing is doctoring the economic reports? But no amount of hyperbole—nor doctored ledger books—could overstate the scale of economic growth and change that I see here in Hohhot everyday. Within blocks of our apartment (in what was recently the southeastern fringe of the city) you can see vast construction projects on a scale that is dumbfounding. Hohhot is no Potemkin village—there is real wealth flowing into the city, which is sprouting new luxury apartment complexes and shopping malls like mushrooms during the rainy season.

New apartment complexes line the Second Circle Road. A billboard advertises the good-life to prospective tenants.
Construction requires labor provided primarily by the Chinese countryside. Peasant migrations pour into the cities for work. Tyler, my American colleague, tells me that communism has eroded the Chinese work ethic. I’m not so sure. It seems like everyone is always working and you can hear the clanging of construction sites well into the evening, even on weekends. This woman is working at a site just down our street a couple miles where I have seen roads and apartments appear out of the dust in the last three months.
Yes, those are donkey-carts loaded with bags of cement. All available labor is driving China’s modernization. Maybe this doesn’t look efficient, but when you have the bodies—human and animal—who needs labor efficiency? The sense of movement and energy is truly amazing.

Societies often claim to have centers that hold the essence of their character. Beijing is the center of the Chinese government. Shanghai is the center of China's fantastic growth and modernization. New York is at the center of America's cultural life and Los Angeles is the center of our popular culture and Washington D.C is the center of our political life. And yet, if you really want to know about American politics you have to leave the beltway. If you really want to see the most vital art you have to leave New York. If you want to gauge America, you start on the fringes--in the exurbs and suburbs. In the nineteenth century you would have seen America most fully on the frontier. Philanthropic societies and reformers prevailed on the privileged and established East Coast, but the settlers were killing the Indians on the frontier--that was the heart of America at that time: Manifest Destiny and westward expansion.

The same might be true today of China. You need to go to its fringes to really see the new China. On the fringes, you see the transformation of village China into modern China. In Hohhot you can see the city literally chewing up the countryside; vast acres of farmland giving way to miles and miles of apartment complexes; new roads plowing into the countryside; huge stretches of construction where migrant construction workers squat at makeshift noodle tents before they go back to work. Hohhot does not have a large foreign population. It is not cosmopolitan. But the streets are increasingly filled with cars. Everyone, including the vendors with donkey carts and the peasants driving two-cycle tractors, seems to have cell phones. You can see the city changing before your eyes: new malls; five star hotels; McDonalds; KFC; Pizza Hut.

This is all happening in Hohhot.
I stopped my bike to take pictures of this wall of advertising surrounding a new construction zone on the edge of the city, and this guy stopped his bike-cart contraption to look at me.

Thanks for reading.

Dave