Of note, the author uses the expression “poor second generation (穷二代)”, the direct opposite of the “rich second generation (富二代)”. More interestingly, he refers to “second generation farmers (农二代)”, as if the transition from farmer to urban resident was a natural progression. However, there have been generations of Chinese farmers — in fact, this is one definition of traditional Chinese culture. What then, we might wonder, is it about Shenzhen that gives rise to the expectation that each generation must do economically better than the last?

Shenzhen: Unfortunate Generation 80, Unhappy Workers, and the Hopeless Poor Second Generation

First of all, let me explain that my title refers to me. Perhaps you, who are reading this heading are one of the lucky Generation 80, the happy office workers. Or, maybe you’re one of the poor second generation or a second generation farmer but aren’t hopeless. If so, congratulations. My opinion isn’t going to be yours, its only representative of my thoughts.

Why is Generation 80 unfortunate? To use a phrase that everyone knows, when Reform and Opening opportunities covered the earth, if you dared, you would succeed. In the telenovela “Foolish Youth”, Silly Older Sister casually opened a business and got rich. Likewise, anyone who came to play in early Shenzhen could open a clothing factory. But what did Generation 80 do? Some of us were in our mothers’ bellies, some of us were sleeping in a quilt, and most of us were without ancestors and afterwords a goddamn one-child movement. As I remember, childhood was being homeless, dependent on others, and no time for family reunions. I just watched “Only You”, which told the story about a mother who became a general manager, who spent her time agonizing about the fact she couldn’t leave work at 6 o’clock to go home and spend time with her child.

What I want to say, if we compare stories its enough to make one pissed off. I remember that up until I was 7 years old, I didn’t know what my mother looked like. So how would we describe my situation? My mother wanted to give birth to a brother and so she went off in hiding to the mountains. At the same time, I was in danger of being taken away by the Family Planning Bureau. So I was always hiding, just like a common criminal, moving between my parents’ families. At that age, I wasn’t thinking about personality and human rights issues. All I did was cry every night for my father not to leave me alone. I had neither toys nor friends because I was afraid of strangers taken me away. My young body couldn’t withstand that bitterness. The reason for all of this was so my parents could have a second child. And once they did, our house was destroyed and our possessions confiscated. Do you think I’m exaggerating? Well, I’m not sure what happened in other places, but those who don’t believe my story should go to a Guangxi village and ask; the people who were there are still healthy! Having a child outside the policy, penalties, forced abortions, no money, living in hiding? The monk can escape but the temple can’t. Anything worth money was all taken away, include the door frame. You still won’t tell us where the mother is? We’ll destroy the house! I’m not parroting someone else’s story, this is what I saw with my own eyes! Today, we don’t worry about raising children as if it were a heinous crime, but that’s how we have lived the 80s.

Unfortunately, even after members of the 50s and 60s generations had taken advantage of the opportunities to get rich, we were still children. By the time we had identity cards, they were the ones who got rich first [a reference to Deng Xiaoping's justification for unequal reforms]. In contrast, we welcomed the era of a saturated and competitive market.

Previously, building a house with your own hands was a common story, today its a fairy tale and words from a dream. When we were still in school, fervent passions and enthusiastic words seemed to be singing, “Our future dreams are assured, our hearts follow our hopes…”

However, once you got into the real world, then you understood — all of the territory had already been occupied by someone else. Because you were self-reliant, you thought that based on your intelligence, you could discover a space in the market and then succeed. Because you had tracked down books about entrepreneurial success, you didn’t let go of any romantic thoughts about “the next big thing”, always thinking that you could do something that no one else had done, exceed the competition, earn huge profits from and build a home with your own two hands.

But after you had exhausted all your ideas and options, then you discovered, China doesn’t lack for people. You weren’t the only one who spent your entire day scheming to take advantage of speculative opportunities; everything you could think of doing, someone else did long before you! You want to be an interloper? Sorry, but you’re stealing someone else job. In addition to monopolies, China also has territories and unstated rules. You want a bowl of porridge? Sorry, you’ve arrived too late. If you want to steal a bowl by force, then you’ll need either enough money or social status or power. But if that’s the case, can you say that you built your house with your own two hands? Thus, the lesson is if it’s not the first pot of gold, don’t waste your time. If you’re a proletariat living in a thatched hut, what can you do? If your parents or relatives have money, you can get their support. But in that case, once again, you’re not the protagonist of this essay because you’re not the poor second generation, you belong to the rich second generation or the bureaucrat  second generation…

If you belong both to Generation 80 and the poor second generation, then fate has given you two roads forward — studying or wage labor. Many people have crossed the narrow bridge of education and changed their fate, but many more have become wage laborers either because they had the misfortune to have been poor or have received bad grades they couldn’t continue studying. Their profession is called common labor and they are called many different names — vagrants, migrant workers, rural workers, and outside service workers. Now its fashionable to call them New XX People. They spend their youth in repetitive, mechanical lives. They are a machine in the factory, 80 to 90 percent of them are crowded together. Their household possessions are a suitcase and a bed quilt. They sleep on rickety bed frames. They earn the government’s minimum wage. In fact, if you are actually paid the full minimum wage you’re doing okay. In “our neck of the woods”, minimum wage is the most common salary, its also the highest salary.

I’ve said so much and still don’t know if it can be printed, so I’m just going to stop here and say more later. What I want to emphasize is that we of the poor second generation have the ideals and courage and responsibility to better ourselves, however we’re discovering that in the present situation, we really are this helpless. We don’t want to be resigned, but we don’t have the strength to change the situation.

Ask yourself, if you knew what it is to walk this road, if you’ve experienced endless failure and tribulation, would you realize that your courage is nothing more than empty words of comfort and would you feel hopeless when thinking about the future? Would you discover that no matter what you do, you are unable to change the dictates of fate and can only watch your youth waste away?

I’m in Tianjin, listening to the firecrackers that go from dusk well into the early hours of the morning. Traditionally, people set off firecrackers from New Year’s Eve through the Lantern Festival. Firecrackers also provided an opportunity for Tianjin friends to distinguish themselves from Cantonese people because “northerners love firecrackers more than southerners”. In fact, they said, the further north you go, the more festive the towns as firecrackers don’t stop.

I don’t actually know how much of my friend’s claim about northern enthusiasm for pyrotechnics is true. I do know that early on, Shenzhen attempted to outlaw firecrackers. In fact, I remember buying illegal firecrackers and setting them off at the coast. We drove with a truck full of illegal poppers to houhai land reclamation area, snuck out, and set them off. This year and last, however, I’ve noticed stands selling firecrackers because — according to a friend — the SZ Municipal government finally accepted the fact that it was safer to sell legal firecrackers and regulate production than the alternative.

I’m also told that people set of firecrackers just to “burn money”. Last year, the economy was good and people celebrated by “burning money”. However, this year I’m told that there are fewer people willing to buy firecrackers because of economic difficulties. Nevertheless, everyone I’ve talked with has set of firecrackers or played with sparklers; we bought a box of fireworks and watched them light up the sky for all of five minutes. New Year’s — relatives and friends emphasize — is the People’s holiday. In contrast, on National Day, only the government willingly burns money and, my friend joked, those fireworks are of different quality.

Consider, for example, the quora question, “Why do so many Chinese learners seem to hate Dashan (Mark Rowswell)?” Mark Roswell provided a succinct analysis of why westerners feel aversion toward Dashan:

“In short, the reasons seem to be as follows:

1) Overuse – people are sick and tired of hearing the name Dashan;

2) Resentment (Part A) – Dashan’s not the only Westerner who speaks Chinese fluently;

3) Resentment (Part B) – Being a foreign resident in China is not easy and Dashan gets all the breaks;

4) Political/Cultural – People wish Dashan had more of an edge;

5) Stereotyping – The assumption that Dashan is a performing monkey.

Yes, yes, and yes. But. If we’re giving our time and energy to figuring out why we hate Dashan, then we’re not giving or time and energy to (1) finding ways of politely acknowledging a conversational gambit and then adroitly changing the topic to one of common interest; (2) working through our own ego investments in speaking Chinese well: ‘Why,’ we wonder, ‘aren’t the Chinese complimenting moi?’; (3) being happy for someone else’s good fortune; (4) being the critical change we want to see in the world in general and China in particular, and; (5) becoming more proactive in our own lives.

At this level, justifying aversion seems like a party game; ‘Where’s the harm?’ you may wonder. The harm is in training ourselves to use our time and energy to justify our aversion rather than training ourselves to live that much more compassionately. In fact, by searching for answers to the question, “Why do so many Chinese learners seem to hate Dashan”?, we end up justifying our aversion, rather than figuring out how to overcome it.

Unfortunately, our habitual rehashing and refining our sense of aversion often snowballs into justification for hating groups of people, such as Chinese students in the United States. Consider the following abridged quote from a recent China Law Blog post on the reasons that US students dislike Mainland Chinese students:

• “They don’t come here to learn. They just come here for the grades.”
• “I am convinced that if our teacher asked the class what 2+2 equals, and nobody spoke up who is not from China, not a single student from China would answer.”
• “I cannot even stand having to listen to them give presentations. Their English is terrible and they don’t even try. Somebody else must have taken the tests for them.”
• “You will never see any of them at any school function. Never ever ever. Unless it can help them with a grade.”
• “I’ve heard that most of them cheated to get in.”
• “The school claims they contribute to diversity. That’s a complete lie. How can someone who never says anything contribute to anything? Everyone knows they are here only because they pay the foreign tuition rate.
• “This is a great way to ruin relations between China and us.”

Again, the underlying logic in these sentences is the same as that in the Dashan party game; I feel aversion for X because Y. In fact, the self-evident logic of aversion means that in the CLB post no one actually has to say “I dislike Chinese students.” Instead, all that is necessary is giving the reason for feeling aversion. Thus, CLB reports US students having said, “They came for the grades; don’t talk in class; don’t participate in school events”. Nevertheless, the message in every sentence is the same: I dislike Chinese students.

As with hating on Dashan, so with hating on Mainland students. The time and energy given to justifying aversion for Chinese students limits the time and energy we have for (1) creating an academic system in which learning and grading are more integrated; (2) teaching discussion based math classes, where the point isn’t to answer how much is 2+2, but rather discussing how abstraction works; (3) holding university admissions departments accountable for the English language ability of admitted students, or having an English fundamentals requirement before students transfer to the formal undergraduate program; (4) developing more inclusive school events, which would mean figuring out what kinds of events not only Chinese, but more foreign students might enjoy; (5) going cold turkey on listening to negative gossip about people we already are inclined to dislike; (6) realizing that diversity means ‘different from me’ and not merely ‘different in a way that I like’, and; (7) figuring out how to make US-China relations better one person at a time.

All this to make a simple point: the problem is never the object of our aversion, but aversion itself because there is always a more creative and interesting and compassionate means of responding to the world as we find it. Easier said than done, perhaps, and yet so much better than the alternative.

According to the authors, their design offers a new understanding of the relationship between knowledge and the city. They define knowledge as:

A mental map of the known world, is as much a mirror of our own conceptions as it is a description of reality.

Their goal is to create a university that is as complex and nuanced as a contemporary city:

In conceiving an infrastructure of knowledge, we argue for a reformulation of knowledge that moves by way of a stricture between the complexities of human life and the complexities of the knowledge archive.

In order to dissolve the deep fissures – social and architectural – between Shenzhen’s diverse neighborhoods and malls, urban villages and industrial parks, the authors propose installing “open source infrastructure”. They envision a series of linked spaces, including classrooms and research spaces, libraries and laboratories, in addition to dormitories, cafeterias, and laundry facilities threading through the 20-kilometer corridor. They also propose to thematically integrate different areas into the university system. For example, Huaqiangbei, the former center of electronics production and sales would become a design campus, while the OCT theme park area would focus on ecology.

The Urbanus proposal aims to democratize and harmonize knowledge. On the one hand, the authors accept the proposition that “knowledge is power”. Consequently, their design grapples with the idea that if access to knowledge is democratized, then society becomes more democratic. On the other hand, the authors argue that knowledge/power is maintained through social divisions and spatial barriers. Thus, their idea of an open campus aims to provide spaces for sociality and communication, creating more organic (or in their lexicon “ecological”) forms of knowledge/society. In other words, the proposal imagines a shift from knowledge as an expression of power to knowledge as a medium of social engagement.

Here’s the rub: This isn’t a living proposal. Indeed, these debates had more or less finished by 2002, when construction on Shenzhen’s University Town (大学城) began in Xili. By 2008, construction was advanced enough that professors had been hired and students recruited for the various universities. Indeed, Shenzhen’s University Town is the location of Southern Institute of Technology, the Municipality’s effort to open a college on the liberal arts model. Moreover, branches of several Hong Kong universities have been located near Shenzhen University’s southern campus, and commercial laboratories have been opened in other Districts. And yet. This 2011 article is based on a 2009 Shenzhen-Hong Kong Biennale exhibit; it was out of date in 2009, so why rehash this information in 2011?

This is where and why it becomes apparent that the proposal uses knowledge as a metaphor for a more ideal society, but not actually as a word meaning, well, knowledge in the more traditional sense. In the proposal, each of the five knowledge areas is represented by images of people “learning” or “researching”. However, these images are in fact pictures of people conducting daily tasks, which are presented as instances of knowledge appropriation or use. Thus, pedestrians on the Huaqiangbei pedestrian street illustrate “design” knowledge, fishing is an example of “environmental” knowledge, skateboarders show off ecological knowledge, white-collar workers walking on an imaginary stairway in front of the new Koolhaus stock exchange exhibit knowledge about “money”, while swimming in an imaginary pool becomes “body” knowledge.

If the article aimed to rethink how we integrate learning and research into urban fabrics, then it would have been necessary to include the historical context of planning Shenzhen’s University City. However, from the article as written, I don’t know anything more about Shenzhen’s actual knowledge infrastructure than I did before I read the article. On the other hand, if the purpose of the article was to raise awareness about Shenzhen’s need for better and more equitable public spaces, surely the authors could have made that argument by calling a public space a public space. Again, as written, the article didn’t teach me anything about public space in Shenzhen that I didn’t already know or that couldn’t be learned by walking the streets.

All this to say, that having read The 20 Kilometer University, I find myself in the strange position of agreeing with the authors’ critical impulse, but not actually knowing what their critical point is. As it stands, I agree with both the article’s stated intention (to rethink the relationship between knowledge infrastructure and the city) and the article’s implicit argument (to improve and democratize Shenzhen’s public spaces). Nevertheless, I left the article uncertain about what the authors may or may not think about these issues. And that’s a problem precisely because one of the functions of knowledge as knowledge is to clarify rather than to confuse. It’s also a problem because once again it illuminates the limits to peer review when our peers are simply people like us, begging the question, what do the editors Theory Culture & Society actually know or bothered to learn about Shenzhen?

I also visited the Luohu Commercial Center, where the English spoken by the various shopkeepers caught my attention. It seemed as if copied out of a stereotype of Hong Kong movie because it was so standardized, “Missy, copy watch. Missy, DVD.” In English, speakers shared the same accent, vocabulary, grammar, and inflections despite the fact that they spoke different Chinese dialects and had different levels of formal education. Some spoke Cantonese, others Mandarin, still others conversed in Hakka and I think I heard Chaozhou language, but the English had smoothed out into something recognizably “Luohu”.

So, I’m thinking about the way that situations — like immigrating to Shenzhen or working at the Luohu Commercial Center, for example — mold us into expected types, making it easy for our diversity to be discounted because rendered superfluous. I’m also wondering how we train ourselves to see beyond expected type, not only when interacting with others, but also when presenting ourselves because the differences actually make us interesting.

As of Jan 1, 2012, China’s big cement ten are, in order: Hailuo (海螺水泥)、Southern (南方水泥)、China United (中联水泥)、China Resources (华润水泥)、Sinoma (中材集团)、Hebei East (冀东水泥) 、TCC (台泥水泥)、Sunnsy (山水集团)、Huaxin (华新水泥)、and Hongshi (红狮集团). Together they have the capacity to produce just under 581 million tons of clinker, annually. Just how much can be built with all that cement? Well, the Empire State Building weighs in at 370,000 tons. This means that ten Chinese cement factories produce the mass equivalent of 1,570 Empire State Buildings. 

Admittedly, mine are all rough statistics. And yes, the Empire State Building is more than concrete. But. The Big Ten aren’t the only clinker producers in China. And. The cement producers are one part of large conglomerates. Some, like China Resources are active developers in Shenzhen. Perhaps it’s no surprise that CR is heavily invested in the SEZ’s urban village renovation projects (Dachong). Nevertheless, my point is simply to contextualize the scale and relative monopolization of wealth development and capital accumulation currently happening in the country.

The breakdown, below:

[update Jan 16: realized last night that what I am interested in is a continuum of engagement -- surrender-resignation-acceptance-submission. I skipped over the resignation bit in discussion below and that is where I should have headed. Instead, I jumped directly into the differences between surrendering and submitting. Nevertheless, am leaving original post, MAO]

About Marxism: I had been used to thinking in terms of “the dialectic” and “socialism — change the world”. However, when YQ made a joke about China being more Marxist than Marx, the Chinese laughed and I did not. One of my friends asked, “But you’ve read Marx, right?” Me nodding. “Well then you know about 唯物主义 (dialectical materialism).” Apparently, the joke is that Chinese materialism is no longer dialectical just in your face materialistic.

About buddhism, which links to recent post on Hongfa Temple. Friend’s neibu (内部 insider, but specifically within the Party) information is that there are two many Christians in China and, as a general rule, they are more frightening than buddhists. Reference to the Boxer Rebellion. Another mentioned that buddhists accept (接受) reality.

I gleaned three things from this conversational logic. (1) Christians (unlike materialists) change the world; (2) Buddhists are harmless, and; (3) 接受 in this context is surprisingly close to the English idea of submit. When I checked my handy online dictionary, however, I learned that submit is usually translated with 屈 plus another character (从 or 服, for example). Now, here’s the cross cultural rub: 接受 is good, leaning toward receive; 屈 includes the sense of being wronged (委屈). In contrast, my sense of submit is that the action is neutral. At stake is who we submit to. Thus, I think of submission as voluntary and surrender as forced, which seems closer to the meaning of 屈.

My reconstruction of last night’s conversational logic is that submission (to the Christian god or Socialism, for example) gives strength to change the world, while surrendering does not. One surrenders to the materialist deluge? Meanwhile, I’m hoping that buddhist practice is also a form of submission that empowers non-violent engagement with the world.