Cute Policing
by Tong Lam (photo © Tong Lam)A lot has been said on the rise of China’s soft power in the international arena. What is less often discussed is the rise of police soft power in urban China in recent years. Indeed, although policing has always been a central component of the government’s penetrating apparatus of social control, Chinese police forces have recently begun to adopt a softer image in certain contexts. For example, residents of Chongqing still vividly recall the young, heavily made-up female traffic cops introduced by the former local party chief Bo Xilai. Similarly, when Bo was the mayor of the city of Dalian in the 1990s, he also instituted the idea of having young and good-looking female police officers patrolling the city center on horseback, a practice that has apparently outlasted Bo’s political career.
Indeed, while many observers have associated the use of young female police officers with Bo’s peculiar populist policies, the idea of cultivating a benign image for the police has become routine in Chinese cities. Generally, the emergence of a neoliberal economy since the 1990s has resulted in a fundamental restructuring of China’s social and economic landscape. In urban areas, this involves the growing disparity between middle class residents and migrant workers who do physical labor and perform service functions. Meanwhile, the gentrification of city neighborhoods has also led to the creation of new urban spaces dedicated to leisure and consumption.
Yet, these newly created public spaces (or, more accurately, these privatized public spaces) are never really designed for the masses in the broad sense. On the contrary, the highly visible presence of security guards, police officers, and various forms of surveillance apparatuses, such as closed-circuit television cameras, in these spaces is part of the neoliberal regime of social inclusion and exclusion, of the sort described so famously, with reference to California’s biggest metropolis, in the Mike Davis classic City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. In this context, the urban poor and “undesirables,” such as migrant workers, are made to feel unwelcome in what are purportedly “public” spaces. At the same time, the constant presence of the panoptic gaze does not just reassure the rich elites and middle class citizens of their safety, it also helps to instill a sense of fear and insecurity among them, making them appreciate the role of the state in maintaining law and order.
The rise of cute-looking police surveillance apparatuses is therefore part and parcel of contemporary China’s strategy of constructing a “socialist harmonic society” in an increasingly tension-ridden society. And while comparable cute-looking surveillance apparatuses can be found in other East Asian societies such as Singapore, Taiwan, and Japan, they should also be seen as part of a larger global trend of masking the ever penetrating state power with softer and more benign images.Recommended Reading
Guilty of Indigence: The Urban Poor in China, 1900-1953 by Janet Y. Chen (Princeton University Press, 2012): a study of how the Chinese urban poor were managed by the government in the first half of the twentieth century.
Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution by David Harvey (Verso 2012): a critique of the historical relationship between global capitalism and the city, and a discussion of how to create alternatives to the current system.
In spite of being called the “world’s manufacturer,” China has been moving toward a consumption-led economy in the past two decades. In the aftermath of the Tiananmen uprising in 1989, the government has worked hard to create a consumer society as a way to divert the attention of the expanding middle class from its rising political demands. The emphasis on consumption, particularly household consumption, has taken on new significance in recent years as the government uses domestic demand to counteract the ongoing global financial crisis. Yet the story of consumption in China also involves foreign tourists, transnational corporations, and consumers elsewhere. In effect, China is now a circuit of global consumption. And the various types of consumer products and information that saturate everyday life, as seen in this online photo essay, are some of the evidence.
William Gibson: meet Tong Lam
by Jeff Wasserstrom
Once upon time (well, say a century ago), when people thought about the excitement and terrors of the urban future, the cities they would focus on were likely to be European or North American ones – places such as Paris, London, New York, and Berlin. During the decades following World War II, new cities, mostly ones perched on the Pacific came into the mix, including Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Singapore and Tokyo. Most recently, Chinese mainland cities, which seemed anything but futuristic as recently as the 1980s, have become important symbols of the dreams and nightmares of the contemporary age. In particular, Shanghai’s skyscrapers and superfast maglev train have led to comments about its ahead-of-the-curve features by everyone from urban theorists to celebrities. To cite just one of the latter, Paris Hilton, upon arriving in the city for the first time a few years ago, exclaimed simply: “Shanghai looks like the future!”
Ghost Malls of the Instant Citiesby Tong Lam
When the South China Mall (later renamed the New South China Mall) opened its doors in Dongguan, Guangdong province in 2005, the Western media hailed it as a symbol of China’s new consumer age. With more than 7 million square feet of leasable space, the mall was supposed to have over 2,300 stores and was meant to be the largest in the world. The developers estimated that the mega mall would attract at least an average of 70,000 visitors a day. As a comparison, the Mall of America in Minnesota, the largest in the US, is only about one-third of that size. Even the massive West Edmonton Mall in Alberta, the largest in North America, pales in comparison. In their initial promotional material, the developers boasted that the mall would become a “one stop consumption center” and “a global business model.”
However, since its opening, the mall has no more than a few dozen, mostly small tenants at any single time. Over 99% of the retail space has been vacant and will probably remain so. As a result of its disappointing performance, the planned luxurious Shangri-La hotel was never built; nor were some of the supporting facilities. Yet, given the magnitude of the project, the mall is not allowed to fail, and has even been designated as a tourist destination by the government. For now at least, the mall has stayed open, and it is essentially the most deserted mall in the world. On a regular day, most of the people on the premises are maintenance and service personnel.
During the past decade in China, close to a hundred new shopping malls have been built each year. While some of them have become modern ruins, there are also many thriving and successful cases. The failure of the New South China Mall is therefore not an indication of the lack of consumer culture in China. Quite the contrary, after the Tiananmen uprising in 1989, consumption became the government’s major answer to the growing political demands of the middle class and the rising social tensions in general. When the global financial crisis began to unfold in 2008, the central government further emphasized the importance of using domestic consumption to bolster the national economy. The failure of the New South China Mall can instead be attributed to problems of speculation and overdevelopment, poor urban planning, as well as the absence of organic growth in these “instant” cities. For instance, although Guangzhou, the provincial capital, together with the neighboring cities of Dongguan and Shenzhen, have a population of over 25 million, New South China Mall was built on agricultural land on the outskirts of Dongguan, reachable only by car. Given that the prefecture-level city of Dongguan is made up of new factories and low paid migrant workers, the failure of the mall is no mystery.Deserted mega malls like this are only the tip of the iceberg. All over China, there are instant cities that are becoming “ghost cities” with plenty of unoccupied residential buildings, office towers, and shopping complexes—all deemed too large to fail, at least for now.
Recommended Viewings
Utopia, Part 3: The World’s Largest Shopping Mall. A short documentary film by Sam Green and Carrie Lozano, about the New South China Mall. The film premiered at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, and was broadcasted on PBS’s acclaimed POV documentary series.
Images of a vintage poster depicting Shanghai No. 1 Department Store in the 1950s. These images reminds us that a vibrant urban consumer culture did not just exist in early twentieth century, it lingered on at least in Shanghai into the early years of the People’s Republic.Read the rest of LARB’s China Blog here.
Images © Tong Lam
by Tong Lam (and images © Tong Lam)
Increasingly, civic leaders from around the world are using designer architecture to brand their cities as sophisticated global business and tourist destinations. China is no exception. The absence of a strong civil society to challenge these intrusive projects—which are often carried out in the name of “urban renewal”—means that in many cases Chinese cities have become a playground or laboratory for foreign architects, who normally would not be allowed to carry out such ambitious projects in their home countries.
In Beijing, the big-ticket buildings that saturate the city’s skyline include the CCTV Headquarters by Rem Koolhaas, the National Stadium by Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, Terminal Three of Beijing Capital International Airport by Norman Foster, and the National Centre for Performing Arts by Paul Andreu. Completed in 2007, Andreu’s curvy structure is particularly significant because of its proximity to Tiananmen Square, the capital’s symbolic center. While the building is colloquially known as the Giant Egg, some locals have also suggestively referred to it as a big “drop of tears,” which is a not-so-subtle reference to the bloody suppression of the Tiananmen uprising in 1989.
In any case, China is now the world’s biggest market for architectural services, and it draws established and young architects alike from all over the world. But what remains relatively unknown is that some aspirating young Chinese architects are also starting to make their marks on the global scene. A case in point is the Beijing-based architect Yansong Ma. In 2007, Ma and his MAD Architects won a major international design competition in the Canadian city Mississauga, which is located just outside of Toronto. The objective of the competition was to come up with a landmark residential building that could pack a visual punch and give the generic suburban enclave a new sense of identity. In the initial plan, there was only one tower. However, as a result of the popularity of Ma’s design, the developer decided to turn the project into twin towers, which have since been dubbed by the locals as the “Marilyn Monroe towers.”
Although a world apart, these two landmark structures are not just connected by their shapely contours (generated by computer aided design (CAD) technologies). They are also connected by the global circulation of consumer desire, fashion, cultural spectacle, architectural practice, and capital.
Recommended readings:
On the Edge: Ten Architects from China, edited by Ian Luna and Thomas Tsang (Rizzoli International, 2006): a critical anthology that examines China’s burgeoning architectural scene through ten emerging architectural and design studios in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.
Commodification and Spectacle in Architecture edited by William S. Saunders (University of Minnesota Press, 2005): a collection of critical essays that examines the relationship between contemporary architecture, commodity, and capital accumulation.
A migrant worker cleaning the façade of a brand new designer building in Chengdu, Sichuan Province. Image © Tong Lam
In recent years, China has increasingly tried to project itself as a cultural soft power. During the recent 18th Communist party congress, for example, party officials boasted about the numbers of new museums, art districts, cultural heritage sites, and other cultural infrastructures that had been created in the past decade. Yet, so far, the vast majority of Chinese migrant workers can merely participate in the country’s expanding cultural industries as unskilled service workers or physical laborers. Recommended pairings:
For reading: Michelle Dammon Loyalka’s Eating Bitterness: Stories from the Front Lines of China’s Great Urban Migration (University of California Press, 2012), a work of reportage that profiles migrant workers in the city of Xi’an.
For viewing: Jia Zhangke’s The World (Shìjiè), a 2004 film that focuses on the lives of migrant workers in an Epcot-like Chinese theme park.
This is the first of a series of posts by photographer Tong Lam, who will be a regular contributor to this blog. The contributions by this historian, author and visual artist based in Toronto - whose work I discussed on this site before - will present viewers with an image taken in China that focuses on the kinds of places, actors and actions that often get overlooked or treated superficially in mainstream coverage of that country. - Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Asia Section Editor
