Guangzhou Dispatches

We walked through the empty rooms, Li Si, the student and I, squinting in the dark. The air was sticky and still, the way things are before the sky opens up with rain. It was somber in those bare rooms. Outside on the balcony we could see the splashes of light knifing through the building as it towered upwards. This wasn’t the only room cloaked in permanent night – floor after floor staked above us stretching to the dark gray clouds. We imagined what it would be like to learn this place was yours. We talked about what it would be like to know that you family’s centuries of fishing and farming were at an end and that this darkened shaft would be what replaced all that. Li Si had his camera pointed to the ground. Along the new white tile floor blackened paper was arranged in a series of clumps on the floor. Offerings to assure fortune for life between these pristine walls, sacred rites for a new home.

The apartment sat low within a forest of white towers with blue metal gates. There few people there the day we first visited. A couple of workers lounged below the bright red signs that stretched the entire height of the newly constructed buildings. “A Warm Welcome to the Villagers from Guanzhou Island,” one read in stark white characters. Everything was ready.

About a month ago my friend Li Si and I started filming a short documentary on a strange island on the outskirts of the city. The place is called Guanzhou, and in addition to hundreds of years of history this island village now also boasts a subway station. I fell in love with this place almost a year and a half ago, when the subway line was finally completed. You get used to weird things and startling juxtapositions in China – inevitable when things are changing so quickly – but there is something that shook me when I emerged from the subway escalators to face vegetable fields and a chicken scampering across the entrance. It’s just so breathless this whole development thing, so unrelenting how these villagers’ fates had already been decided in such an unmistakable way. I’m not some romantic, I came to Guangzhou because I wanted to see what the leading edge of the Chinese economic machine looked like. Yet it was clear there had to be some story here, something going on that would make sense of this well-trodden narrative of change and building and progress. It’s just so hard to describe what it’s like to ride the subway and emerge in glittering sunlight to encounter absolutely nothing. It stops you cold.

After discovering the place I visited about once a month. My favorite spot for a while was an abandoned tile home with regal columns, full ceramic bathtubs and floor after floor of western toilets. Everything had been trashed, but a large mirror inlaid with fish still clung to the wall – glued on and useless to scavengers. The top floor opened onto a balcony with a mattress. From the balcony you could see everything. To the left were still green waters of the village fishing pond. Beyond it the only thing that had spared this island its 21^st century facelift for so long, a lazy, meandering river. On the far shore lay another island, far more massive. This was University City, a former patchwork of villages and fields that had been converted, in about a year, into the home of 18 different universities. It must have been strange watching a new world arise before your eyes, but none of the villagers I talked to had much to say about it. And then, to the right, was the construction site. The plans are to convert Guanzhou Island into a Biological Research Island filled with laboratories and some factories, a process that first requires a tunnel to the academic bounty of University City. Beyond a crude brick wall the island becomes like an orange moon pierced by pole after pole of rebar. The main hole sinks far down to the ground. A portrait of Mao hangs over the entrance, hallmark not of some abiding patriotism, but of the fact that this is a government project, and there are standards to maintain. Soon after I started visiting the island, my favorite building was razed.

Not long before we started filming, I wandered through town because a local had told me there was a meeting of some kind taking place at the old temple. I showed up late, and the meeting had already finished by the time I got there. The main entrance was flanked by government officials, all of whom were not the least bit pleased with the wandering white guy loping through. The reason was clear enough. Inside the temple walls was a vast clear plastic case protecting an architectural model – a vision of the islands future. The thing standing in between the jittery government officials and the promises of sparkling new towers was, of course, the motley assortment of fishermen and farmers loitering in the main square. That day’s was a meeting of the near future, a discussion of what, exactly, the villagers could expect to get for their land, and where they’d be relocated to make room for the new world of biological research. Li Si and I had stepped into a firestorm. There is nothing more sensitive than this. Forget Tibet, Taiwan, the whole mess. It’s the farmers the government is afraid of.

I can’t claim ignorance about the whole thing. At first it was just a kooky island with a short life span. But illusions of a harmonious transformation evaporated quickly. Every year, by the Chinese government’s own statistics, there are tens of thousands of street-level protests. More often than not, these protests involve villagers, and they involve issues of land seizures (this still being China, no one actually owns the land they live on). Usually these sorts of things go undocumented and unseen (even factoring in the explosive rise of the internet, it’s a rare 40 year-old farmer with the wherewithal to spread news to the blogosphere) but in Guanzhou a particularly violent uprising somehow caught the attention of the international community.

One day, as a villager was walking home from the fields, he was struck by a passing dump truck. The man’s relatives and friends came streaming out of the village, demanding some sort of compensation for the man’s leg. Harassed, the construction workers, most of them immigrants from elsewhere, returned to their work sites, grabbed whatever was handy, and then returned to the village to quiet the infuriated locals. The details are sketchy even now after a year has passed and you ask villagers to remember what happened. One thing that was clear, though: a villager was bludgeoned to death. In the subsequent days, a squadron of over a thousand police officers arrived at the dusty, declining village. I went back to the village two days after all of this had happened. I went because I was new to China and I was stupid, because I thought by seeing things, by recording how things really were, I could find something approaching truth. Instead, I was trailed and approached by a party member. He said, you know, that he was just curious why I was here, and had I heard about the “disagreement” on the island. What began was a kind of absurd China conversation that happens all the time when you run into officials. Hi. Give me your phone number. No, you give me yours, I don’t give me phone number to people I don’t know. Yes, but it would be better to give me your phone number. My phone isn’t working, far better to give me your phone number and I can contact you. What’s your name? It doesn’t matter, what’s yours? Oh, you can just call me “boss,” but I need to know your name? Why? You won’t tell me yours…and on and on until someone stands up to leave.

On the day I went to the meeting, I was quickly ushered out of the temple hall by nervous officials. I walked around the corner to the main square. Guanzhou gets people wandering through from time to time, local University City art students mostly, but I think I’m the only regular foreign visitor and by that time there were more than a few people who recognized me. A few gathered around, asking what I thought about this whole thing. I confessed I had no idea because no one would tell me anything. A spry, tiny man perked up. He walked up to me, grabbed my hand and dragged my briskly through the village streets. We wound through alleys until we came to a darkened room with a couple of hard wooden chairs and a black table with a hole cut out for the head so you could lie face down. We sat. He offered me tea. And then he began railing against the government.

It’s hard to know what to do in a situation like that. Police and government officials were no more than a few hundred feet away and here I was, sitting in a darkened room with a village doctor as poisonous words of cheating and lying and corruption are thrown around. Look around, he said. The air here is great, the view is great, the weather is great, and now there’s a subway. Don’t believe when they tell you development is in the name of science, he said. On this land, his land, there will be apartments and hotels and his prime family land will make a great many men very, very rich someday. And, of course, who knows. In a culture of disinformation and a predisposition to distrust the wildest claims seem feasible because there are hundreds of examples of similar things happening all over the place.

Then the details. So much money per square foot promised at first. Then figures revised up and down with dizzying speed by government people who just want these farmers to pack up their grungy existences and move to the modern new residence towers built especially for them just across the river. A normal married couple could expect their home and fields to be converted to exactly 120 square meters of apartment living once this was all over. The man declared he was staying put for as long as possible. Other villagers had already caved and signed contracts releasing their land and agreeing to the government relocation package. Not him. He was holding out until the last minute because he was sure compensation would rise as developers grew panicked about villagers making a scene.

For me disillusionment set in almost immediately. Its not that I had some grand idea of what I was looking for, that China was a growing capitalist machine with many people getting thrown to the wayside is a story long stale. Stale too are stories of development and change because they are so constant and ubiquitous. You start to wonder after a while what stories there really are still left to tell here, stories that aren’t just rehashes, with different central characters, of the constantly dynamic process of growth and readjusted expectations. The arguments being held by villagers, the things they are most animated about, have long ago left the realm of the abstract. No one talks to you about community. About history or how their parents told them stories of the land and their eternal connection to it. In retrospect, it’s a necessary sort of disillusionment. So much western thinking about China is just so old-fashioned, so out of place as to be functionally useless. So conversations with villagers about the future of China often revolve almost entirely around hosing prices.

Of course, if you hang around long enough you learn some crazy things. Some of the really ancient people here have never actually set foot on the mainland. When the subway opened, officials gave the locals a few free rides to get them used to the new possibilities of modern transport. It would take a while to dig that main tunnel to University Island and in the meantime farmers could zip to the financial district to unload their produce by the subway entrances. One woman laughed as she told us how some old guy yelled “Oh! I am dying! I am dying!” once the train doors closed and for the first time in his life he was whisked along by a power source that wasn’t an animal. And then there are just local stories, tales of a place with a history of any other. There is a massive, ornate house in the center of the village, a place that is extremely nice and well constructed in the context. A villager tells us the place is the former crown jewel of a villager who went into business and made good. It’s empty now. Family fights and outsized ambition finally laid the proud man low. A place with stories like any other.

Guanzhou sits to the southeast of the Guangzhou economic machine. It’s a place that was simply leapfrogged by development. Further south, beyond University City, is Panyu, a suburban area now boasting Asia’s largest water park. To the north and west is the dense urban network of buildings and streets of a massive city on the make. Once you zoom out a bit, the wresting of land from villagers not too far from some of the most expensive land in China seems not only inevitable but long overdue.

We met a few Guangzhou officials, central planners and designers and the like and when they laid out their maps of the city and pointed to the unbelievable growth, it’s easy to think that, yet, development really couldn’t happen any other we. We sat in the office of one of the chief architects of the vision that would send bulldozers and cranes to level Guanzhou, a tiled, comfortable room that overlooks the Pearl River. In the distance, across the water, is Zhujiang New Town, an assortment of high end towers destined to be the city’s new Central Business District despite the warrens of peasants still living there. Less than five minutes walk away from people still living in their old villages a Ritz-Carlton has opened for business. He told us how things happened in Guanzhou.

It all started in America. Decades ago, a Guangzhou native immigrated to the States to study and begin his new life. He adapted, growing rich and beginning to think of ways to operate on a large scale. Seeing the American market as saturated and slow, he triumphantly returned to his native land, armed with visions of real estate developments and prestige-building science center projects to transform his hometown. This was 1999, well into the Reform and Opening economic miracle taking place in Guangzhou but just a little before China was ready to move from industrial generation to luxury, high-end living. The idea to completely redevelop Guanzhou was scrapped for lack of interest and lack of funding. An old newspaper article I found at the time shows the extent of optimism that propelled the entrepreneurs at the time. Everything would be completed, the article said, sometime in 2003.

Five years later, the project is far from completed. It’s a rare example of administrative lag, a lone holdout in a city of projects conceived and executed in the time it takes American developers just to draw up architectural plans. It’s a sign though, more accurately, of the curious set of motivations that actually compel growth much of the time in China. In 1999, when the futures of the Guanzhou villagers were first discussed, development of the area constituted a high-profile personal vanity project for an overseas Chinese. A lot had changed since then. A local professor, who worked on the city master plans during that time, took University City as an example. China has an overwhelming number of people, for sure, but it’s hard to conceive of any city in the world able to justify demand for 18 new universities complete with professors, facilities, and thousands upon thousands of students. And, for a while, no one in Guangzhou could either. Then, pressure mounted. Some enterprising party guy in come other city, probably Nanjing (which, by now, has three University Cities), up and built a university complex out of nothing. Regardless of city need, this was career rocket fuel. With so many people and so much competition in every industry in China, maintaining the status quo is the surest way to disappear completely in the general masses. Now, however, this leader had a concrete project with measurable advances to point to – more education, more students, more professors, and who could argue with that? Within a span of two or three years, the planning official said, the question shifted from “Should we build a University City” to “Why the hell don’t you have a University City yet?” In a high stakes version of keeping up with the Joneses, University Cities sprung up just about everywhere in China and within a year an unimaginably large scale project had already been completed. Suddenly Guanzhou Island became a potent addendum to this effort to achieve Guangzhou country-wide recognition. Though most everyone agrees that there will be at least some real estate profiteering that will happen on the island, media reports and official announcements were now all in line: Guangzhou had suddenly encountered an epic dearth of world-class biological research laboratories and, now, to catapult Guangzhou to the international stage the formerly unnecessary Biology Island project was turned into a top priority. Some villagers were moved out and expensive drilling of a rather extraneous tunnel (given that University City is not a place heavily concentrated in scientific research) began. The countdown for demolition of the entire island suddenly began.

Until you start talking about sensitive things, like land issues and right and the like, villagers in Guanzhou are generally open, positive and happy. My best friend in the area for a while was a man born, unfortunately, with stunted, useless legs. He would take me around the village on his three-wheeled motor bike, and smile approvingly as I sat down to play Mahjong with the locals. Disabled, he receives a government stipend and has long ago given up on trying to find a job. Some of the other villagers still tend to their land, but as bulldozers ready later stages of the development, most people have been left with compensation checks and nothing to do all day except relax and enjoy the last few months of their village’s existence.

Working and writing and talking to people in China often leaves you feeling silly and unimportant. We had been gingerly filming over the course of three days, capturing images of subways and farms and construction vehicles, of old ancestral halls where the Revolution-era engraving of Mao’s face had long ago been whitewashed over by villagers unable to fully erase his visage. And, moronically, we grew bolder, interviewing villagers without really thinking about the best way to do things. I’m not often scared by things in China – being a foreigner goes a hell of a long way towards ensuring you are more trouble than it’s worth for officials looking after you – but on that third day I was frightened. Li Si and I were walking along the edge of the local school’s basketball court when two young, determined police officers approached, asking what we were up to. A thousand things flashed before me in that instant. Contained in our camera were some not so flattering images and some not so flattering villager comments. There, too, were the faces of villagers talking, unfettered, before we could go in and edit and make sure that everything was protected and contextualized and of no danger to the generous individuals who agreed to talk. Then, of course, there was the director, Li Si himself, who knew that if things took a turn for the worse it was he, not me, who would bear the brunt of any problems.

You’re faced with a couple of choices in cases like that, all of them bad and potentially dangerous and all of them completely dependent on just how sophisticated and high level the individuals who detain you happen to be. As far as I am concerned, the only possible strategy is one of openness and total compliance, but in the instant before I could react Li Si chose another strategy. He stonewalled, refused to give his name, dropped names of powerful people he knew and tried to walk away from the situation. Crazy as this sounds, when you’re dealing with lower level people this is often a necessary strategy for proving that you are not someone who can easily be rolled over. Having stumbled into a sensitive situation it would be hard to convince the powers that be that our aims were educational and not at all potentially hazardous for their careers. Had Li Si been peaceful (not wanting to contradict and undermine a friend of mine who presumable knew more about what was going on than I did, I adopted the always useful idiot-foreigner pose) it is likely that video tapes would have been confiscated and viewed leading at the least to a loss of a day’s work with potentially far greater consequences if the tapes contents were misinterpreted.

This was, of course, a small, painless event – just the zealous precautionary measures of street-level cops knowing their beat is a sensitive zone and wishing always, always to err on the side of caution. But it was one that altered my sense of power dynamics like little else. One becomes suddenly so powerless, so uncertain of what comes next. And when your adversary is an official you know that rules and regulations can become extremely elastic if you happen to put them in a bad mood. And by presenting a defiant front Li Si had certainly done that.

So we sat there for half an hour, gathered on a stoop while villagers crowded around, gawking. The question loops began, about names, passport numbers, anything, really, that the cops could put on paper to show that they had done their professional duties. Supervisors were called and a man in army fatigues showed up to join the standing around and staring. It wasn’t so much a stand-off as a prolonged state of suspended animation, a realization by both sides that nothing was wrong and yet something was fishy and that something needed to be done but no one had any idea exactly what that was. The cops gathered around the corner to discuss what to do next, and scurried farther and farther away as we approached asking how long we’d have to sit on a village stoop waiting for nothing to happen. They balked. And then, in a move that sent my heart into my chest, Li Si opened the camera and pointed it at the officers themselves, saying he was just testing the thing out. Suddenly freaked out themselves, the cops abruptly let us go, our cameras and tapes unscathed. It was frightening.

The village isn’t dead yet. Bisected by a tunnel construction project and outfitted with an architectural modeling of the future of an island the villagers will never again call home, traditions are still alive. An old friend of mine and a former student was traipsing around some local villages during the recent dragon boat festival. Before villages get together and race their elongated canoes, villagers paddle around the river visiting their neighbors with good wishes. It’s a day long affair, with teams of paddlers gliding in to say hello. The day after, my friend called me, laughing. She had spotted the Guanzhou boat drifting through a village. They smile and dance for the camera, waving their paddles in the air. As they turn to leave, though, they slowly realize that a large passing ship has led sluice gate operators to adjust the flow of water. The video shows the villagers ducking down, almost flat against the bottom of the boat, hoping to slide under the gate and out to open waters. They move too slowly and are forced to retreat, spending much of the next hour trapped in a lagoon that didn’t exist when they first paddled into town.

Well, I don’t know. I guess that feels like a metaphor for something. Villagers trapped by forces beyond their control or something. Or maybe it was just a case of bad timing, or something of absolutely no importance at all. Whatever. There’s really no time for nostalgia in China now.

The villagers themselves, at any rate, don’t seem to be dwelling on it all that much themselves, either. The time of protest and resistance is long over, and now it is simply a matter of time before contract with the government are signed and construction begins on the island. Who will profit from all this, and how much, and how tall the buildings will be that replace the shoddy homes that now constitute this ancient, gutted village, will simply remain to be seen. Decisions have all already been made by men not that far away in buildings and meetings you’ll never had access to, so all you can do is wait and watch. Many villagers have already signed away their land, and we heard that the government had recently finished the sparkling new buildings where the villagers would be moved wholesale after the tunnel was complete and the construction firms could begin their work in earnest. Villagers had finally gotten a hold of their future apartment numbers, and over the course of a few days curious villagers could come and inspect the towers where their village would be relocated.

And, so, we went, asking people if we could come with them as they examined their future digs. One smiling family took us up with them to the 11^th floor, where they’re sun-splashed new two-bedroom apartment was. They fiddled with faucets and toilets, admired the views in the distance. They pronounced themselves immensely pleased. I asked them when they planned to move in and they looked at me and laughed. Anyone could see, they said, what was coming for Guanzhou a long time ago. The younger people had long ago left for the city center, securing jobs and apartments outside of the old world of farming. But this clean, government subsidized apartment, offered to them because they still had land rights on the island, would be the perfect sort of thing to hold onto for a few years as development crept south. Then, this building meant to relocate an entire village would be an attractive place to live for new Guangzhou arrivals. When the market was right, the place could be flipped and the not too long ago farmers could pocket quite a sizeable profit.

Across the hall, a middle aged couple looked out from their balcony at the rows of towers before them. Well, they said, there was no choice really. It was here or nothing. At the entrance to the tower complex, there is a big boulder emblazoned with the name of the neighboring village. From the balcony you could look over this village, a place of tiled houses and rolling hills with a few fields in the distance, a place, that is, that looks remarkably like Guanzhou. The two sections of town – the towers of the newly relocated and the low-slung buildings of the indigenous villagers, were separated by a small ribbon of asphalt road. I asked them how they felt living in a new village. What do you mean? They asked, incredulous. This is still Guanzhou and we are in charge of our own affairs, they said.

Looking out over the towers it was hard to understand how this could be. “This is Guanzhou South,” she said, “And over there is Guanzhou North.” She was referring to a similar development of government buildings meant to house the Guanzhou displaced. There would still be a village mayor presiding over the bifurcated town, but with no land anymore to deal with she wondered what they would talk about. Behind her, her husband had broken out a tape measure and was studiously collecting dimensions for the room. The two of them, they admitted, were a little peeved about this whole thing. It turns out that everyone over the age of 18 is eligible for some sort of government handout because of the move, and they talked about a neighbor of theirs with two grown kids who didn’t even work or anything who just lucked out with apartment grants while the two of them simple had one apartment between them. I asked the man weather he was trying to see if their old furniture would fit. No, he said. The government said that they would give us 120 square meters in exchange for out old place. He was simply trying to calculate what they had actually been given. He didn’t have a head for numbers so my student helped him out with the multiplication. The husband and the wife looked over at the small piece of paper when it was all done. Calculations for the new apartment were complete: 90 square meters.