In this and the next video,
the subject matter of demolition will be addressed.
Demolition has become an important theme in China’s contemporary art and literature,
because the toll for the country's rapid economic growth is large-scale demolition,
no matter whether it is for urban reconstruction,
rural development, or infrastructure projects.
Even more importantly, it is a phenomenon with
highly disturbing visual and environmental effects.
It has been argued that
the state’s extraordinary tolerance vis-à-vis the demolition of historical buildings
and whole villages across the country led to the rise of
predominantly faceless, urban high-profit constructions.
What used to be organic neighborhoods with narrow alleys and small courtyard houses in
cities, or simple farmhouses surrounded by fields and pastures in the countryside,
was rapidly turned into
metropolitan satellite towns with apartment houses, shopping malls,
business centers and industrial plants since Deng Xiaoping
implemented his economic reforms during the 1980s.
A similar phenomenon can be observed not only in the People’s Republic of China,
but also in Taiwan,
Hong Kong under the British regime,
Singapore, and indeed all Asian metropoles.
In the People’s Republic, however,
the speed of demolition and reconstruction was arguably
even higher, and the effects more shocking, than elsewhere.
In this image from NASA,
you see the sprawl of the city of Chengdu in the year 1990 in yellow
and the buildings that were added in the following ten years in orange.
Especially the recent development of cities without people, in expectation of
the 250 million or so peasants that
the Chinese state intends to relocate during the coming decade,
alarms citizens and foreign observers alike.
Fully built, empty cities awaiting residents are a new phenomenon;
their lack of history and organic growth
raises many questions concerning their future livability.
Is there a way to feel at home in these neighborhoods?
Will people living there be able to connect and
interact meaningfully with the space they inhabit?
One wonders about what was there before the construction. Old courtyard houses,
temples, gardens, rice fields, meandering paths?
In many places, the ruins or traces of former buildings are still visible,
although it is clear that they will not be around for much longer.
The overwhelming presence of ruins,
rubble and debris provokes
strong affective reactions ranging from grief and depression to anxiety.
In a recently published special issue of
the journal “Frontiers in Literary Studies in China”,
which focuses on the concept of ruins in contemporary Chinese culture,
Deborah Tze-lan Sang defines ruins as
“embodiments of transience and decay.”
As such, “ruins provoke
strong affective responses while inviting musings on the underlying historical,
economic, and sociopolitical forces that have led to
disuse, depopulation, or peripheralization.”
Furthermore, “Ruins are also a rich reservoir of symbolic and allegorical possibilities,
often mined by artists and writers to signify moral decay,
the crumbling of value and belief systems,
spiritual desolation, and nostalgia,” she argues.
Evidently, the growing fascination with
the symbolism of ruins among China’s intellectuals
is a result of contemporary material culture and its materialistic ideology.
Behind the visible changes in landscapes and urban design,
there's a complex reality of
municipal land seizures and property demolition, which negatively affects the population.
Wade Shepard reports in his book,
“Ghost Cities of China: The Story of Cities without People in the
World’s Most Populated Country” that within the past decade,
up to four million rural people were relocated each year.
According to statistics provided by Beijing’s Renmin University and others,
only a minority among them received access to
the new urban infrastructure in compensation for their lost homes.
Similarly disturbing is the lack of balance between property seizures and
the dislocated people’s access to adequate compensation in land and new homes.
Since the beginning of China’s economic boom period,
more than 64 million people had their homes demolished and/or land requisitioned.
Thirteen million people or twenty percent of these property seizures went without
compensation, according to a survey by members of Beijing’s Tsinghua University.
A Tianjin University research project provided
statistical figures on the vanishing of villages:
during one decade, between the years 2000 and 2010,
the number of China’s villages dropped from 3.7 million villages to 2.6 million.
That means that over one million villages disappeared,
which equals a rate of approximately 300 villages per
day that have vanished within the ten years of observation.
Naturally, such large scale demolition produces
negative side effects, such as psychological distress,
social turmoil, cultural loss,
and huge amounts of waste.
Moreover, many less tangible problems are currently relegated to the future,
for instance, the question of what will happen when
the property rights of these new houses will expire, or when houses
deteriorate to the point of uninhabitability
long before the expiration of the 70-year legal ownership period.
Another issue, the problem of construction waste,
has already become huge.
“With respect to the more than two billion tons of
construction waste that was produced in China in 2011,
only five per cent were recycled,”
reports a study conducted by members of the University of Hong Kong.
Besides the health risks of
dust and toxic substance emissions from randomly amassed demolition debris,
there is an acute danger of landslides.
On December 21, 2015,
a man-made hill of construction debris with a storage capacity of 95 meters with
actual stacking height of 160 meters
collapsed in the city of Shenzhen, province of Guangzhou.
It buried alive 73 people and toppled dozens of buildings.
The major political reason for a phenomenon that Wade calls an “orgy of
destruction” was that municipal land sales had
become the main revenue of municipal governments.
Georgie E. Peterson, in his “World Bank Policy
Research Working Paper” dating from November 2006,
shows that beginning from the 1990s,
booming cities such as Shanghai or Shenzhen could
yield up to 80 per cent of their total revenue through land leasing.
New research reveals that the negative impact of
this urbanization movement is currently addressed by the central government.
Experiments with green gross domestic product comprising
compensation and award schemes for sustainable development are already underway.
When China first published the results of GDP loss calculations due to pollution in 2006,
it was estimated that in 2004,
511.8 billion Yuan, or three per cent, were to be deducted on account of air,
soil, and water pollution
as well as environmental accidents.
After several years of green GDP research in the country’s leading think tanks,
a model of measuring 26 indicators and rewarding local governments for
their shift towards sustainability is currently
tested in Shanghai and other pioneering communities.
Meanwhile, artists, writers, and media workers contributed their own responses to
what they perceived and visualized as a cultural crisis since the late 1980s.
This is going to be the subject of the next video.