When a Billion Chinese Jump (22 page)

Done right, cities can ease humanity’s stress on the environment, according to the demographer Joel Cohen.
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They already provided homes for half the world’s population on just 3 percent of the planet’s land.
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An even bigger proportion could be accommodated if urban expansion was upward rather than outward, if there was good investment in public transport, and if energy efficiency was promoted through urban planning and architectural design. With an extra two billion people likely to join the planet’s population by 2050, the best way to make space for everyone is to house them in the sky.

But while compact, clean, vertical cities are the modern ideal in Europe, Japan, and Canada, urbanization in China has long tended toward the 1950s U.S. model of big suburban villas and commuting by car. Thomas Campanella, the author of a book on the country’s urban revolution, wrote that the differences could hardly be greater: “When it comes to the environment, China and the West are moving in opposite directions, and at blinding speed.”
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The result, he concluded, was sprawling inefficiency and worsening emissions.

In the future, the government wants to concentrate the population in belts of supercities, including one thick urban string that will thread its way up the Yangtze from Shanghai to Chongqing through Nanjing, Hefei, and Wuhan.
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To tie these conglomerations together, a high-speed railway is due for completion by 2012. That is just the start. Urban development looks likely to become more intense nationwide. The consulting firm McKinsey advocates the creation of dense urban belts between Beijing and Tianjin, Shanghai and Suzhou, and Guangzhou and Shenzhen. The Dutch architect Neville Mars envisages a day when city clusters will fuse together to create a superintense megaconglomeration stretching from Beijing to Shanghai and along the Yangtze.
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Chongqing was trying to set an example of how a city could grow big and stay clean. Its mayor, Bo Xilai, had earned plaudits for greening Dalian with lawns earlier in his career. Now he was trying to go one step further
by creating a “forest city.” Such was the rush to plant urban trees that other regions complained Chongqing had left no saplings for them. The government also set aside an “ecological shield” region in the northwest of the municipality, from which people were encouraged to migrate to the inner city and alleviate population pressure on the Yangtze.

But the cleanup remained a low priority compared with economic growth. As people move off the land and into the sky, they produce less and consume more. In theory, they become socialized and civilized. In practice, they spend more time shopping and eating junk food.

A nearby shopping center could belong to any city on earth: pedestriani-zed streets, boutiques, Kentucky Fried Chicken, McDonald’s, and a giant screen blaring out pop-jingle ads. As people buy, eat, and drink in ever greater quantities, they produce more waste. Dealing with that rubbish is becoming an ever more pressing problem.

I took a taxi into the hills to see the biggest of the megacity’s megarubbish pits: the Changshengqiao landfill. It was an awesome sight; a reservoir of garbage more than 30 meters deep and stretching over an area of 350,000 square meters, the size of about seventy football playing fields.

The waste engineer Wang Yukun told me the city produced 3,500 tons of junk every day. None of it was recycled. Some was burned. Here, it was layered like lasagna: six meters of rubbish, half a meter of soil, a chemical treatment, and then a huge black sheet of high-density polyethylene lining. Three years after opening, the site contained more than a million tons of rubbish.

Once it was full, the city planned to build a golf course on top. The day when people would be driving and putting on top of a mountain of garbage looked set to come sooner than expected. “The site was designed to serve the city for twenty years, but it has filled faster than we expected. I guess it will be completely full in fifteen,” Wang predicted.

The same was true for sewage and industrial wastewater, which was contaminating the giant reservoir behind the Three Gorges Dam, a few hundred kilometers downstream, sooner than expected. As fast as the authorities were building wastewater plants, the pollution in the Yangtze was outstripping their capacity. The impact on agriculture and public health was estimated to cost Chongqing about 4.3 percent of its annual GDP.
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The story was common throughout China. Move farmers into the city
and their consumption of resources increased threefold and their emissions surged along with their junk.
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By 2020, when the government aims to create a
xiaokang shei
(moderately prosperous society), the volume of urban garbage in China is expected to reach 400 million tons, equivalent to the figure for the entire world in 1997.
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With cities already struggling to cope, that problem looked set to be a new source of social tension and environmental degradation.

Cleaning the streets of crime was another urban challenge. In many Chinese cities, the public security bureau was more likely to detain journalists than to take them for a drive. But in Chongqing, the city went so far as to dispatch an English-speaking officer, Lai Hansong, as a guide. I was suspicious that he was just another propaganda official, but Lai insisted he was a regular beat cop who had been patrolling the Yuzhang district for six years. “It is a low-crime area,” he said. “We mostly deal with thefts or fights.” In an average week, he claimed, he dealt with fewer than five incidents.

It was not what I expected, having heard lurid stories of drugs, prostitution, and organized crime. The city had recently been the focus of violent industrial protest, and conflicts over land appropriation were common as the city expanded.
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The picture Lai painted was very different: “There are no criminal gangs in China. Our country has few riots.” But someone was clearly worried about something. The police force, Lai said, was increasing every year and officers had to travel three to a car. Not long after, Chongqing was rocked by one of the biggest crackdowns on “black society” mobsters in modern Chinese history. Six gangsters were sentenced to death for murder, machete attacks, and price fixing. Investigators detained more than 1,500 suspects, including the deputy chief of police.
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For dinner, I went to meet some of the city’s alternative thinkers at a riverside restaurant. This was a city that dazzled when night fell. The swirling surface of the Yangtze reflected a neon rainbow, brightly illuminated housing blocks, art deco skyscrapers, and motorway crash barriers that, for no apparent reason, glowed pink, green, and purple.

My dinner companions included a film director, a publisher, a poet/ cartoonist, and an environmentalist. They laughed at the notion that there were no gangsters, and some shook their heads at claims that the haze was just bad weather. Overall, they felt living standards were improving. Cultural
development might be slower than material development, “but this is a city of the future,” said Li Gong, the poet/cartoonist.

“Compared with ten years ago, the air quality is better. But compare it with other cities in China or other countries and we are still far behind,” said Wu Dengming, an environmental activist who founded the Green Volunteer League and helped expose the illegal chemical emissions by local factories and pollution buildup behind the Three Gorges Dam.

Zeng Lei, a documentary filmmaker who spent seven years recording the lives of Chongqing’s poorest residents, related unhappy anecdotes of urban life: the
bangbang
man who burst into tears when he returned to his home village for the first time in three years; the housewife who felt so neglected by her family that she hired a team of
bangbang
men to carry banners through the city celebrating her birthday.

Song Wei, a publisher, noted that the evident problems—pollution, loss of heritage, inequality, and crime—were not confined to Chongqing: “We could be talking about almost any city in China.”

The similarity of China’s cities was a legacy of Stalinist state planning and a sign that aesthetics and heritage preservation were low priorities. During the Mao era, much of the nation’s building stock was hastily thrown up according to a tiny handful of designs.
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The economic reform period was barely any better. Although there was more variety, the rushed spirit of that age meant the quality of design and construction were often awful. At the county level, this created a tatty and tedious urban landscape of almost identical rectangular structures decorated with the same white tiles and tinted windows. As China became wealthier, cities looked to international architects for inspiration, but that often meant urban landscapes came to resemble those overseas rather than having their own distinct identity. Qiu Baoxing, the vice minister of construction, said the damage done to the nation’s architectural heritage was similar to that inflicted during the Cultural Revolution. “Many cities have a similar construction style. It is like a thousand cities having the same appearance,”
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he complained.

Chongqing was not just urbanizing, it was globalizing. Little more than a generation earlier, this had been a city where Red Guards in Mao tunics chanted anti-imperialist slogans. Today, young people with money dressed much like their counterparts in Birmingham, Chicago, or Nagoya. If anything, their values were even more materialistic and consumption-oriented.

After dinner, Spider-Man’s boss, He Qing, took me to Falling, which he described as the hottest nightspot in Chongqing. It was Wednesday night, but the dance floor was packed with beautiful people moving to techno music and playing dice. Our table had an 800 yuan ($114) minimum charge, which covered a bottle of vodka, a few imported beers, and a plate of elegantly carved fruit.

He Qing introduced me to some of Chongqing’s new rich, including the founder of a candy factory, a restaurant owner, and a bank employee. Without exception they were in their twenties, foreign-educated, and well connected—either through family or political ties—with the city’s movers and shakers. “No businessman can thrive unless they have contacts in the Communist Party and the underworld,” I was told.

I felt uneasy spending more on a night’s entertainment than
bangbang
man Yu earned from a month’s grueling work. I was not the only one conscious of the gap. He Qing told me his plan for the future: “Inequality and environmental destruction are the two biggest problems facing China.” He wanted to establish a new wind-energy company that would employ migrants to build a cleaner city, using German technology.

I felt sure he would make a killing. Chongqing was growing richer, more densely populated, and more environmentally stressed.
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The city government said it would pioneer green urbanization. The city ought to look cleaner and brighter as its population prospers. If the urban middle class followed the trend of the West, they might start to eat more eco-friendly vegetarian food and drive smaller cars. Perhaps. More usually, though, cities tend to distance people from the environment and nurture an unsustainable lifestyle. Metropolises are giant blocks of consumption. Their buildings are fitted with air conditioners and modern conveniences that create an artificial climate. Vertical living represents a shift in consciousness from the horizontal, seasonal life of the farmer to a linear drive for progress. Urban residents laugh at farmers, whose lives go around in circles, never getting anywhere, simply following the seasons. City dwellers, on the other hand, pursue career tracks, expect their lives to be endlessly onward and upward. They tend to measure success by how much they can consume. In the future, as resources grow scarcer, more are likely to be left unfulfilled.

There are signs too that people might be turning their backs on the cities. In Guangdong, which was the first to attract an influx of rural laborers
to its factories, companies have begun to complain about worker shortages. Some economists believe China is approaching the Lewis turning point, at which demand for labor outstrips supply.
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The lure of the city had its limits.

Outside at midnight, the bright lights could not mask a seedier side of city life. Many migrant women worked as prostitutes in karaoke bars or massage parlors. Their children were left with relatives or sent to the streets to beg, sell flowers, or sing for money until the early hours. At a night market, a queue of hawkers offered to clean my shoes, sell me cigarettes, or pour me soup from a flask. A seven-year-old girl plucked at my arm and coyly entreated me to buy a rose from her. “Where is your mother?” I asked. “Oh, she’s at work,” she replied.

A desperate-looking girl came over, carrying a menu of songs and a battered, badly tuned guitar. She said she was sixteen but looked more like twelve. She told me she had been in Chongqing only a few months and had already decided she did not like it. I paid 3 yuan (44 cents) and picked the song “Pengyou” (Friend). The young busker stared at some faraway point as she strummed the one chord she knew and sang out of tune. It was miserably sad.

Farther along the street, a
bangbang
man wandered into the distance carrying his bamboo pole. I wondered if he was about to finish work or start it.

Shanghai

Shanghai was a vast engine of illusions of various kinds. Venture
capitalism going full blast twenty-four hours a day.
—J. G. Ballard
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The resident of Number 550 Huaihai Road in Shanghai was a rather unusual migrant. Born in Wisconsin on March 9, 1959, Barbara Millicent Roberts was the world’s most famous supermodel. She drove a Corvette convertible, owned a dream home with a pool, partied with jocks, and adored shopping. In the U.S., she had been a prom queen and a role model. In China, she was emerging as an ambassador for consumer culture.