  |
China's prosperity has brought with it an increase in crime; most
of the country's suburban style developments are gated, walled,
or, in one case, moated.
(Photo:Thomas J. Campanella)
| As the pace of development ratchets ever higher in southern China,
gated communities and superhighways are the current forms of choice. by Thomas J.Campanella On the farmland surrounding Beijing and other Chinese cities, single-family tract houses are sprouting like weeds. In less than a decade, the romance of agrarian Communism has been replaced by a version of the American dream. But it's a freakish version of that dream; these suburban houses, with servant's rooms, pools, and two-car garages, are being built for the country's emerging entrepreneurial elite, not a growing and aspiring middle class. Exclusivity is their allure: Regent-on-the-Park in Huizhou is "for the privileged few"; Xi Jiao Garden Villas near Shanghai (developed by Deng Xiaoping's son) offers "contemporary living for a discerning clientele... the select few who can afford the best." Ads for these "luxury villas" are everywhere, in newspapers, magazines, on billboards, on television. Can this be the People's Republic? The land of Little Red Books? Although Communism is now honored more in the breach than in practice, it is still incongruous to see a golf course where a generation ago Red Guards raged against the evils of Western materialism. Who could have predicted that, some 20 years after Mao's death, there would be American-style suburbs on the outskirts of Beijing? Like cellular phones, cognac, and Mercedes-Benz sedans, these villas are symbols of wealth and arrival. While America's drive toward the suburbs in the 1950s is usually seen as one of homogeneity, for the Chinese owning a house is viewed as a statement of individuality--a calculated rejection of the stultifying collectivism of the Mao years. But rather than returning to the architecture of their Mandarin predecessors, these entrepreneurs want Western-style houses. Developers favor wedding-cake Neo-Classicism, with Corinthian columns, fountains, and ersatz statuary. Regent-on-the-Park has homes "modeled after luxurious architectural styles... popular in Europe and the United States," with a "California" version for "free-spirited, independent people." Legend Garden Villas in Beijing features Neo-Georgian brick houses with twin-bay garages. The Yuanming Yuan Garden Villas near Beijing's Summer Palace offers a Beaux-Arts palace, a Queen Anne mansion, and a replica of the White House. In the sales brochures, the landscapes against which these buildings are depicted are themselves borrowed--a Louisiana plantation, a California golf course, a New England forest. Very few developments include anything remotely resembling traditional Chinesearchitecture. But treasures from China's past have been recycled to meet the demand for luxury houses. Lushan, Mao's old summer retreat in northern Jiangxi Province, an elegant compound of colonial buildings from the 1890s, is a case in point. The surrounding area has always been one of China's most treasured places, a destination for poets, painters, and Buddhist scholars. Before the Revolution, it was a favorite haunt of the ruling elite. Chiang Kai-Shek called it "the center of the center," and established the Nationalists' summer headquarters there. When the Communists came to power, Mao moved into the house that Chiang Kai-Shek once owned. Lushan became China's Camp David. Xiong Ming, president of the Beijing Institute of Architecture, calls Lushan "one of the most spectacular sites in all of China." But this has not stopped the government from selling the historic villas. When the party elite turned the coastal resort of Baidaihe into their summer retreat some years ago, Lushan was abandoned. A Hong Kong development firm was hired to transform the dusty relics into a first-class subdivision, and a San Francisco--based architect was secured to execute the restoration. (He promptly labeled Lushan "the Aspen of China.") Lushan Villas, as it's now known, is being marketed to wealthy overseas Chinese--the "elite of Greater China"--who want to own a piece of the motherland; the sales brochure carries the headline "Reclaiming Our Heritage." The project has not been without critics, who see it largely for what it is--the auctioning off of a significant national monument. As Hong Kong's South China Morning Post asked, "If China can sell this, what's to stop it from selling the Forbidden City?" In spite of a professed enthusiasm for "Our Heritage," most villa developments betray the heavy influence of American material culture. Their arrangement on the land points to only one source--suburbia. This should come as no surprise. After all, the culture and artifacts of Mei Guo (America) have been popular in China for years, and suburbia itself is really just one giant artifact, a landscape-scale equivalent of Coca-Cola and Mickey Mouse. Villa sales catalogues and promotional materials overflow with images of well-stocked supermarkets, traffic on a California expressway, Caucasian families with golden retrievers, and the inevitable Golden Arches. The new Chinese suburbs share another trait with the American model. Though the Deng Revolution improved the lot of the average Chinese, it has also been accompanied by an exponential rise in crime. As in the gated communities that have taken root across the American landscape, fear is clearly written in the layout and design of the Chinese villas. No subdivision in China is without a formidable perimeter fence or wall (and, in at least one case, a moat), often topped with shards of broken glass; entrances are guarded night and day. For the most part, however, the process by which this peculiarly American style has found its way to China has not been the work of Americans. Although the villas' designers and planners are often from the U.S., they are responding to the directives of the real power brokers--Hong Kong-based developers. For decades the tiny former British territory has functioned as a broker of taste and a setter of trends in the People's Republic. In its final years under the Union Jack, it evolved into one of the most affluent societies in the world. But Hong Kong is land poor, with a total area of only about 400 square miles, more than half of which is parkland. And its steep, rugged topography has made building sites even more precious, creating some of the costliest real estate in the world. With the opening of China over the past few years, many affluent Hong Kong Chinese are finally able to buy homes and land by investing on the other side of the border. "For less than $130,000," the South China Morning Post reported, "Hong Kong people can buy a garden house with spacious bedrooms and living rooms on tree-lined boulevards... the kind of dream homes they could hitherto expect to own only by emigrating to Australia, Canada, or the United States." Typically built far from public transportation, this new landscape is evolving in tandem with a budding romance with the automobile. In many cities, traffic volume is doubling every four years. Needless to say, the environmental impact of this trend is prodigious. Suburban-style developments, with their attendant automobile infrastructure, will only compound the damage. Besides the loss of agricultural land, forest, and wetlands, the increase in emissions will exacerbate already high levels of pollution. The very scale of China makes environmental problems there a matter of global concern. In terms of economic output and standard of living, it is only about 25 years behind Japan and the "little dragons" (Taiwan, Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong); within a generation, millions of Chinese will join the middle class, expecting to own a car and a slice of suburbia. So far, inadequate roads have limited the automobile's usefulness. But forces are at work that will change this. Extensive highway systems are being pushed across the nation at high speed. Shanghai recently completed a major beltway, and Beijing seems to add another ring road every six months. "Roads are being built so fast, in so many new directions," writes Paul The-roux, "that no maps are accurate." But the construction of new highways to alleviate congestion is like pouring sugar on the floor to get rid of ants. It will trigger the classic road builder's dilemma: with every mile of new road, more people decide that automobile ownership is a convenience. Soon the new road is as jammed as the old one, which spurs demand for more roads, and so on. It is a lesson Robert Moses (and many other American planners) refused to learn, the ill consequences of which New Yorkers live with on a daily basis. If there is anyone in southern China who has assumed the spiritual mantle of Robert Moses, it is Hong Kong engineer-cum-tycoon Gordon Wu. At the helm of Hopewell Holdings, Wu runs one of the most powerful conglomerates in Asia. A passionate commitment to highway construction is his point of kinship with New York's "master builder." To Moses, the automobile was an agent of progress, and he reconfigured--some would say shattered--the landscape to accommodate it. Gordon Wu is, if more pragmatic, no less visionary: to him, highways are both profitable investments and the key to launching a new era of development in China. Wu set out to prove this by building China's first superhighway, the Shenzen-Guangzhou tollway. Thirty thousand laborers worked around the clock to finish the 72-mile conveyor belt; it opened in July 1994, after only 26 months of construction. The ribbon of black runs through the heart of the Pearl River Delta, currently the fastest-growing region in the world. Connecting Hong Kong and Shenzen to Guang-zhou, the road has already spawned an "urban growth corridor" along its flanks, serving this booming region much as I-95 does metropolitan New York. (The comparison is more than anecdotal; Wu, who studied at Princeton and named his company after nearby Hopewell, New Jersey, modeled his expressway on the New Jersey Turnpike.) Wu hopes the Shenzen-Guangzhou expressway will accelerate development across the region, eventually transforming the Pearl River Delta into a "single sprawling metropolis." The expressway is, in fact, only the first leg of a "bitumen triangle" he intends to inscribe on the region, within which huge tracts of land will be made available for commercial development. And Wu intends to push farther still: "By the end of the 1990s," the International Herald Tribune reported, "Wu would like to see his highway extend all the way to central China, to the Yangtze River, creating a nearly 1,000 kilometer toll road." The road would pierce the heart of China, carrying with it commerce, prosperity, and a little bit of the American Dream. |
Keywords:
China, Gordon Wu, urban planning, development
