China Constructs

I am an anthropologist researching construction workers, architecture, and development in China. This blog collects reflections on the process of urban construction and inhabitation. Contact me at wbt {a} mit.edu

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Construction and Conflict: “Bus fire kills 17 in northern China; suspect caught”

“State media reported the suspect was upset over a financial dispute with a subcontractor on a settlement project.”

http://news.yahoo.com/bus-catches-fire-north-china-14-dead-over-053702826.html

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On Sunday, a man-made hill of dirt and construction debris collapsed in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen.

The extent of the landslide in Shenzhen, explained in a graphic by the New York Times. The story combines the risk migrant workers are put at by their work, as well as by urban devaluation and discrimination. This disaster, spectacular in scale, is the more visible expression of the structures of violence facing rural migrants in China, particularly in the construction industry. 

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Real Estate Economy: China and Africa

Report: “Real Estate Development Could Drive Future Chinese Investment In Africa” 

An interesting implication is that we may see the exporting of Chinese growth through real estate, a model that many observers have called unsustainable, but which Chinese residents often point to as the hallmark of progress in China’s growing urban areas. 

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Pew Research Center: “Building outpaces population growth in many of China’s urban areas”

Read the article here: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/11/19/building-outpaces-population-growth-in-many-of-chinas-urban-areas/

One of the interesting aspects it mentions is the way that “Urban” and “Rural” land are distinguished for the purposes of reporting on land use:

“The extent of urban building in China can be studied in innovative ways, as seen in the World Bank report, which dispenses with traditional, administrative approaches to calculating urban populations and instead uses satellite imagery and census micro-data to measure urban density. The study defines urban areas as contiguous lands with 50% or more of the area covered by built-up infrastructures such as roads and buildings, and whose overall population was 100,000 or more in 2010. 

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Bill Gates - on China, bigness, scale, material, and concrete,

via the Hufflington Post, which writes:

"Think about this for a second. Between 1901 and 2000, the U.S. built an entire interstate highway system, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Hoover Dam and just about all of its skyscrapers -- to name just a few concrete-intensive things. China did all that, and almost half again, in just three years."

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2011年央视兔年春晚 深圳民工歌舞团《我们工人有力量》

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Death and Construction

There is a recurrent theme in writing about both large-scale and small scale construction that focuses on danger and death. From interest in the construction of the Pyramids to the Great Wall of China, to Hydro Electric Dams, to projects today, there emerge prominent narratives about death of workers--both journalistic and apocryphal. In it, is not just a factual recounting of the conditions of building -- but something that also borders on ideas about construction and destruction, making space sacred. 

From the Washington Post:

Eighth worker dies during World Cup stadium construction in Brazil

"Mohamed Ali Maciel Afonso, 32, became the eighth worker killed in stadium construction ahead of the World Cup in Brazil, which starts June 12. Maciel was an employee of the firm ETEL, which is in charge of a portion of telecommunications work at the stadium." -

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Field Productions is a day-long exhibition of alternative expressions that index and interpret anthropologists’ concrete and embodied engagements with the field: visual journals, art books, sketches, poems, and other experimental formats. Accompanying these alternative creations will be a series of workshops to share ideas for making, collecting, and communicating in formats not typically acknowledged as “anthropological knowledge”

Unlike presentations or publications, field productions fail to transcend the everyday. Records and collections from the field recall the surplus of enthusiasm, contingency, and immediacy of feeling—elements that we often edit or omit in order to properly present ourselves as professional anthropologists.

Field journals and other creations of the field are rarely seen, despite the central  role they play in asserting our academic personae. They are artifacts that straddle the world that scholars create with each other, and the other worlds we inhabit in the field. They reflect the ambivalent social and ethical relationships that pertain between researchers and subjects. They also reveal the personal anxieties about living up to our discipline’s expectations.

Field notes retain an intimacy and aura of encounter and experience that remain relevant, often past the expiration date of theory.

At the AAA conferences, formal programmed content provides structure, but the most socially productive spaces are not necessarily on stage; its most important discussions are not on mic. The goal of creating this event-based pop-up style exhibition space is to experiment with ways of creating more spontaneous occasions for connection and learning. 

By exhibiting traces of anthropology’s various fields, the exhibit also measures the distances that anthropology traverses. These objects serve as material evidence of the “chaos of facts,” reintroduced to the luxury hotel space that we have collectively chosen as our stage where we present Anthropology to one another. The juxtaposition of these worlds in this installation asks anthropologists to literally inhabit their contradictions. It is a space of reflection on the ambivalence of all production: to acknowledge the contradictions that we necessarily repress when we take up Marx in the Marriott.

The project builds on the recent expansion of Installations at the AAA in order to conduct active workshops with an audience of participant observers. By bringing in museum curators, artists, and others who use these mediums in discussion with anthropology, Field Productions allows for simultaneous celebration and criticism of our discipline’s motives and means.  

The structure of the exhibit and programming are tailored to engage audiences across hierarchies—formal and implied—within the discipline. Moreover, the project promotes capabilities and sensibilities that fall outside the standard range of expression and outside the sphere of disciplinary evaluation. Field Productions draws on the energy of experimentation to suggest that practicing difference can produce different anthropology.

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"The Wages of Fear" - article from the SCMP

The South China Morning Post this week published this article on migrant workers, especially those in construction, are cheated out of wages -- sometimes by violence. The article quotes Pun Ngai, Sociologist at Hong Kong Polytechnic University, one of the best writers on the political economy of the construction site:

Construction work is considered one of the riskiest fields for migrant labourers, who - because they are not documented when they move from their small towns to find work - are rarely covered for workplace injury, missing wages and abuse because of developers' close ties with the state, Pun explained.

-chinaconstructs.com

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"China's True Heroes"

This video features photographer Frank P. Palmer, whose photo won a Grand Prize in a 2009 contest of "Beijing in the Eyes of Foreigners."  The photo shows a smiling building crew of migrant workers was titled "China's True Heroes."

From this video interview with The China Daily:

“What they do, they are leaving their family, mother father, maybe their wife, or children. They are leaving their family, they are leaving their friends, their village and they go far away, 500 maybe a thousand, two thousand kilometers  and they do their work every day. And they do their work everyday. There are other heroes: one-time heroes, or sport heroes, they are practicing and then they come to the olympics and then they get the gold medal. But these people, do it for a different reason sure — they have to make some money, that’s their main reason, but they do the work every every day. 

Another article from the China Daily

"China was known for its factories producing clothes and shoes," he said. "But people in this country could make far more complex things than that."

Even within the country, he said, Chinese people were so busy with their own lives that they didn't notice migrant construction workers' tremendous contribution to China's development.

Palmer, who was based in Beijing, went to Shanghai every two weeks to shoot photos of migrant workers building the International Finance Center. 

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"Set among the 'lost generation' of workers in the heavy industrial area in northeastern China who were hit by the policies of reform and economic openness in the 1990s, we see them rekindle their skills and rediscover the joy of working."

Coming to the NYU Skirball Center in April: another contemporary Chinese art project exploring questions of labor and production. (See also Xu Bing's project, Phoenix, at St. John The Divine.) The trend complicates how we should think about China's experience of Socialism and post-Socialism. -Will Thomson  chinaconstructs.com

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More on Labor and Art -- "The contract price of the sculptures is about 10 million yuan ($1.6 million), but Zhang and his team will only get a tiny slice of the pie." ... "I am an artist, not a laborer. When I have enough money, I will make my own sculptures." ... "Major clients usually ask for works from the hands of renowned sculptors, who usually do the designs and then contract the production to teams like Zhang's."

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This image is of today's Google homepage, announcing a contest for students to draw “one thing to make the world a better place.” Google helpfully provides the answer as a foregone conclusion. What invention could it be? Itself. 

Offering $30K prize for a student scholarship, it poses as a charity contest, but the expense of paying one winner (one!) makes this ad campaign an amazing return on investment. The “doodle,” remember is Google’s own name illustrated. The competition entry helpfully provides a ghostly imprint of the logo for students to draw on top of. Imagine your future, kids, but make it spell Google™.

Maybe even more cynically, Teachers “hosting doodling sessions for their classroom may find useful resources such as videos and suggested activities in the 'Classroom Activities' tab.” Schools are given good reason to use class time to mobilize their students to draw on behalf of the company, since the winner’s school will get 50K. I would love to know how much Google paid for the video production and activities, not to mention the agency who hatched this in the first place. I will bet my laptop it was over $80K.

This campaign is surely designed to create long term emotional attachment to the Google Brand. It also helps spread another ideology, directly related to the belief that Google cannot "be evil." That is the quasi-religious faith that that design, creativity, and innovation will emerge as a  deus ex machina to solve global problems. What will these kids learn in school today?

From the judging criteria from the Official Rules: 

(ii) creativity and originality - considering the representation of the Contest theme “If I could invent one thing to make the world a better place…”, and use of the Google logo, as well as the unique and novel approach to the Doodle; 

-Will Thomson chinaconstructs.com

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This video, from New Years 2011 was one of the most memorable performances that I have seen on CCTV's yearly Spring Festival television extravaganza. This clip has mercifully edited out the announcers' patronizing introduction and brief interview that preceded it. The performers were reportedly "found" on the streets of Shenzhen, a group of migrant workers who practiced dance routines in their time off work. The song is an updated, upbeat techno-schmaltz rendition of the Revolutionary song, "We Workers Have Power!" [Listen to a more traditional version here].  -Will Thomson chinaconstructs.com

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This music video by Huang Zheng takes up the issue of China's growing wealth gap. It follows a real estate advertisement through the various strata of contemporary society. As each new person looks at the cost of housing, a number above their head tallies how many years they would have to work in order to afford it. As it is passed along from one to another, each has a different visceral and embodied reaction. One foams at the mouth, the other suffers a nosebleed. They are physical expressions of the psychic violence implicit in that inequality. In the last scene, the brochure is thrown away by a rich man, who can buy it with only 5 day's work. A migrant worker on the apartment's construction site picks it up. Squatting next to a wheelbarrow, in his canvas shoes and army camouflage canvas jacket, he calculates how long it would take to afford one of the apartments he is building: 514 years. - Will Thomson  chinaconstructs.com

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"The poor working conditions for the migrant laborers who were building such luxury towers, he said, 'made my skin quiver.' Mr. Xu had such a violent reaction to what he saw that he decided to make the phoenixes rise, as it were, out of debris and workers’ tools that he salvaged from the construction site." from The New York Times.

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From Apple's Website. What fascinates me about this is the success that sweatshop activists have had in leveraging the esteem for the company in the struggle to make conditions more fair for workers. These pictures of the factory floor have the same aesthetic as the pictures of the Ipad Air. Is something to see Apple go from "Designed in California" to pictures of migrant workers on its website.