The affective core of Chinese life is the family home, an understanding of which helps to explain1 the central role of residential construction in Shijiazhuang’s urban renovation. The desire to improve the domestic living conditions of one’s family and to provide a better future to subsequent generations drives family members to seek a hao yi xie de shenghuo (好一些的生活 — literally, a slightly better life).China’s policy makers are highly sensitive to the economic potential of this desire to improve living conditions. At times they work to incite and exploit the desire for familial improvement as an engine of economic growth, at others to restrain it in order to protect the economy from bubble formation. Beyond direct economic implications, they are highly sensitive to the negative effects of an overheated real estate market on the daily lives of the less well off and poor, and the potential of inflation in the housing market to stymie their familial aspirations. A population with an excessively large group of impoverished, “homeless,” and stymied citizens is a potentially unstable one, and there are no principles more central to the governing philosophy of post-Mao China than those of stability and harmony.
Understanding the hand and glove relationship of familial aspiration and broader economic policy and practice is crucial to decoding the ways in which Shijiazhuang’s urban renovation has unfolded. As discussed here, san nian da bian yang kicked off an explosion of new housing, much of it infill/densification units. The spectacle of this massive, city-wide residential renovation overwhelms the eye, but it is the construction and promotion of entirely new neighborhoods on the clean slate of demolished chengzhongcun that provides the most compelling object of analysis for my purposes. Such projects are enormous in scale and totalizing in terms of their capacity to create and will to promote themselves as deliverers of entirely new and, of course, superior ways of life.
One such “clean slate” neighborhood is the 500,000m2 linyin dayuan(林荫大院/Park County) only now rising from the rubble of Beijiao Cun (北焦村). The project has only recently started construction, but its sales centre and the walls surrounding the demolition-construction site have been in place for more than two years. Objectively, the development will represent a massive increase in population density on this piece of land and a correspondingly large profit for its developer, Guangsha Real Estate Development Co. Ltd.
The overarching slogan for the project, fengjing yuanluo de gushi, appeals to familial aspirations to live the kind of good life imagined to be the norm in foreign countries. These understandings of the good life are cited and incited by ads papering the walls that surround the site, and in promotional images featured in the sales centre and circulated on the internet. In one ad, an image depicting a child bathed in filtered sunlight is coupled with the project tag line to promise the opportunity of a “life story” composed in the “scenic courtyards” of this “500,000 square meter shady forest kingdom.” In another, a similarly bucolic image works in tandem with a slogan that alludes to the poetry of Laozi to link the emergence of an improved Shijiazhuang and the re-emergence on the world scene of China as whole.
Buying a home in Park County, these ads promise, is not only the first step toward a happy and prosperous life for one’s family, but also a concrete contribution to the rise of the nation.
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Notes
1. Concepts like capital over-accumulation, spatio-temporal fixing, and accumulation by dispossession are also crucial — see David Harvey’s The New Imperialism or A Brief History of Neoliberalism for a concise discussion of these terms.
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I know Gordon Chang tends towards the melodramatic but, even if we shave his figures considerably, the recent plans to urbanise even more rural types and also to construct truly monumental megapolises/administrative networks are truly …….
http://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonchang/2013/06/23/chinas-maoist-vision-a-city-of-260-million-people/
It’s an interesting piece, although one sentence caught my eye and neatly summarizes the flaw in conventional wisdom of this kind: “They forget that cities in other societies grew organically, not created through fiats issued by geniuses in planning ministries.” Of course this is ahistorical and/or ignorant pap, but it lies at the core of his argument. He may turn out to be right about urbanization, but if so, it will have been entirely by accident. Thanks for the comment, KT.
More nonsense: “The taking of land, usually held by families for hundreds of years and often seized without adequate compensation…” Taking exception to “usually held for hundreds of years” rather than his normative position.
Wow…so I guess the Chinese are just as mesmerized by bullshit advertising for suburban paradise as North Americans. And again… what’s with all the white people in the ads? That’s so effed up!
This actually made me think a little bit about the scale of “re-engineering” of New York by Robert Moses, although I expect the project in China dwarfs that one. But I expect the weird dynamics — some combination of interplay between state and corporation — isn’t that different. Rose by any other name kind of thing… or sh-ite or what have you…