urban China

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Cities of the Future

September 11, 2009 in Shanghai, urban China by The China Beat | 3 comments

The future is by definition modern – Carol Willis

Modern means Shanghai – then and now – Ben Wood

At the Skyscraper Museum in Battery Park, where lower Manhattan meets the water’s edge, Shanghai is currently on display. Though the museum only occupies a small space, the design by architectural firm SOM gives the illusion of height, and the show is packed with content (including maps, floor-to-ceiling photographs, architectural models, video, and a 20-minute floating streetscape by Shanghai-based photographer Jakob Montrasio).

For those who can’t make the trip to New York, much of this material is now available online at the museum’s superb website. In the coming months, this should be supplemented by recordings of a fall lecture series on the Shanghai skyline, which features architectural talks from many of the most notable firms working in the city (Portman, Gensler, SOM, KPF etc).

The exhibit is designed as an introduction to the urban landscape of contemporary Shanghai. Yet, there is much of interest here even for those deeply familiar with the city.

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Tags: architecture, Shanghai, urban China

The Tael Lights of Old Shanghai

September 5, 2009 in In Case You Missed It, Shanghai, urban China by mcunningham

Tael Lights Cover Clocking in at only 99 pages, Shanghai: High Lights Low Lights Tael Lights is an excellent appetizer for those of us who generally dine on heavier reading fare. The authors, Maurine Karns and Pat Patterson, make their purpose known early in the book: in the preface, titled “an explanation but not an apology,” Karns and Patterson state that they have written Tael Lights “with the hope of enjoying ourselves, of making a little money, and of not committing ourselves to anything for which we might be sorry” (xx). They proceed to describe, with delightful if decidedly un-PC irreverence, the Shanghai they saw before them when writing the book in 1936.

Tael Lights has recently been reprinted by Earnshaw Books, and is once again available to readers looking to supplement their stodgy Shanghai guidebooks with a more tongue-in-cheek introduction to the city. Karns and Patterson have produced a brief, idiosyncratic work — one which does not attempt to detail the entire history of Shanghai or present a comprehensive survey of the city’s hotels, restaurants, and tourist sites, but rather gives the reader a vivid impression of the Shanghai experience. Tael Lights is “Just a sort of a composite of what Shanghai looks like, and feels like and smells like after, say, the third whisky-soda, when, as Shakespeare or somebody said, the senses are sharpest” (xx).*

The absolute necessity of experiencing Shanghai, rather than gazing at it through the viewfinder of a camera, is a recurring theme in Tael Lights. Karns and Patterson urge their readers to forgo visits to the staid Longhua Pagoda and Willow Pattern Tea House, instead suggesting a trip to the Great World Amusement Park, Shanghai’s Coney Island, for tourists seeking a real taste of metropolitan life. The book lists and reviews the hotspots of Shanghai’s nightlife, devoting an entire chapter to “the fleshpots” and assuring readers that “A trip to the Venus [Cafe] is worth the sleep lost and is part of anyone’s education” (57). The writers, intoxicated by both the “Whangpoo whiskey” and the city surrounding them, express this joie de vivre in every page of their book. “The color and tang and spice of China is not in it’s temples nor in it’s lotus strewn gardens but in its crowded streets” (42), they remind their audience.

I was continually mindful of its original publication date, only a year before the Second Sino-Japanese War broke out, effectively bringing to an end the treaty-port society described by Karns and Patterson. Like the television drama Mad Men, currently set in the early months of 1963, Tael Lights celebrates an apparently untroubled world that is in fact not quite so footloose and fancy-free, and which will soon be turned upside-down. While Karns and Patterson mention the presence of the Japanese military in Shanghai, they make light of the Japanese fondness for “playing soldiers” (7) and state that tensions between the countries stem from “the Japanese yen for the Chinese tael” (25).

Their Shanghai is on the cusp of disappearing, yet what is most remarkable about the guidebook Karns and Patterson have written is the sense of familiarity I felt when reading some parts of it. Tael Lights evokes the relentless energy of Shanghai, the cacophony of its streets, and the many indescribable qualities which make it “the most unique city in the world” (2). Although several other elements of the book are entirely divorced from my own Shanghai experiences (the final chapter is entitled “There Are Also Some Chinese in Shanghai,” for example), Karns and Patterson have nevertheless captured a certain slice of the urban landscape that remains recognizable seven decades later. In his forward to the new edition, Michael Schoenhals writes that Tael Lights “retroactively foreshadows like no other work the globalized Shanghai of the 21st century” (xiii). Simultaneously exotic and familiar, the Shanghai depicted in these 99 pages is most definitely “a grand place to live, to work and to enjoy life” (98-99).

*The Earnshaw Books edition of Tael Lights maintains all original spelling and grammatical errors, and quotes here are reproduced without alteration.

Tags: Shanghai, urban China

Learning With the Kids

September 4, 2009 in urban China by The China Beat

Daniel Bell and his son Julien teaching in Beijing

Daniel Bell and his son, Julien, teaching together in Beijing

By Daniel A. Bell

China, as everybody knows, is not a politically free country. There are constraints on political activity and many social critics fall afoul of the system. The foreign press often reports on those cases, leading to the impression that it’s impossible to do any good outside of official channels. What is less well known, however, is that some areas of social life that were once politically taboo – such as the plight of migrant workers and environmental concerns – are now openly discussed in the Chinese media. There are also a growing number of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that do good work in those areas.

One such NGO in Beijing is called Xiezuozhe 协作者 (Facilitator) which came into being in the spring of 2003, when the SARS crisis hit Beijing. Today, it focuses mainly on the plight of migrant workers in large Chinese cities. Its methods are transparent and non-confrontational and it aims to be a constructive force for social change. The NGO gets funding from Chinese philanthropists and large Western companies, and a couple of years ago I joined my wife – a Chinese national who works for one of their donors – on an outing in a poor district in the outskirts of Beijing. I was impressed by what I saw – highly intelligent and sensitive young people clearly moved by the plight of migrant workers, listening to the workers and their children with respect and no hint of condescension, and thinking of practical ways of ameliorating their situation. So when I heard that they might be looking for English teachers to help with lessons for the children of migrant workers in the small lanes (hutong) of central Beijing, I jumped at the opportunity. My 14-year-old son Julien was also willing to help, and we volunteered as a father-son team.

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Tags: Beijing, hutong, migrant workers, urban China

China’s Migrant Workers in the Wake of the Economic Crisis: Unemployed, Undeterred

August 12, 2009 in urban China by The China Beat

By Robert D. O’Brien

After growing at double-digit rates for most of the last three decades, the Chinese economy is now in jeopardy of failing to achieve the eight percent GDP expansion benchmark widely considered necessary for the government to stave off social unrest. Although a fairly insulated and underdeveloped financial market allowed the PRC to avoid the first order effects of the global financial crisis, the drying up of China’s main export markets – the U.S., Europe, and Japan – has wreaked havoc on the manufacturing sector, leading to the unemployment of over 20 million migrant workers.

In the wake of the recent mass layoffs, there has been rampant speculation over the possible ramifications of such widespread unemployment for political stability. A multitude of scholars and journalists have written of a migrant class on the edge of revolt – jobless, landless, and growing increasingly desperate.[1] Relatively small, largely localized “mass incidents” (quntixing shijian) – 300 aggrieved migrant workers rioted in Guangdong, 1,000 commenced a march on Beijing from Hebei, and one man blew himself up in a northwest China government office – are widely cited as indicators of future unrest, possibly on a grander scale.[2] A careful analysis of the situation, however, leads one to question the soundness of any claims predicting an impending political crisis. Indeed, an examination of several critical factors, namely the ability of laid-off migrants to meet their basic needs, their reactions to getting laid off, their capacity to organize on a large-scale, and the government’s response to the crisis, all show that it is highly unlikely that Chinese political stability will be seriously threatened by the country’s migrant worker class.

The Vast Majority of China’s Migrant Workers Can Meet Their Basic Needs

Western observers often view the plight of unemployed Chinese migrant workers in stark terms. The prevailing sentiment seems to be that laid-off migrants face many of the same challenges as recently unemployed workers in America – no source of income and no savings with bills to pay and debts accrued. Such a bleak outlook only worsens in severity when the weakness of China’s social safety net is taken into consideration. The combination of the two, unemployment and China’s weak social welfare system, leave many believing that the PRC’s jobless migrant workers have no means of subsistence. This, however, is rarely the case.

While Chinese migrants may lose a significant source of income when laid-off, they are seldom left without a way to meet their needs. A high personal savings rate combined with the difficulty of procuring personal bank loans ensures that most unemployed migrant workers have both accumulated some capital and avoided significant debt. More importantly, they possess land, a dynamic and stable asset. The vast majority of Chinese migrant laborers are either the children of farmers or former farmers themselves. Though some have lost their plots to commercial development, corrupt officials, or environmental degradation, most still have land that they can farm when they lose their jobs in the city. A recent nationwide household survey conducted by the Chinese Bureau of Statistics confirms as much, finding that among unemployed migrants, only 6.6 percent do not have any farmland.[3] When coupled with any savings and a lack of debt, this land provides migrants with a means of subsistence in the face of unemployment.

Given the Chinese government’s historic propensity to skew certain numbers – unemployment figures, cases of social unrest, etc. – in order to make the country’s condition seem better than it actually is, there will doubtless be many who question the reliability of the Chinese Bureau of Statistics’ survey results. While there is no way to independently confirm the findings’ accuracy, the figures are lent credence by current Chinese governmental policy. In the wake of the recent mass lay-offs, the CCP has been “offering numerous subsidies for workers willing to leave the cities and go to rural areas.”[4] Some believe that the government’s belief that a disaggregated migrant population is less likely to engage in social unrest has guided it in devising such incentives for migrant laborers to return home. As scholar Ray Yep points out in a recent Brookings commentary, though, relations between migrant workers and local level officials are growing increasingly volatile, rendering this motive for the subsidies improbable.[5] It is more likely the case that the distribution of such subsidies indicates the Chinese government’s confidence that, as the survey results indicate, migrant laborers can meet their needs in the countryside. If the Bureau of Statistics numbers are indeed inaccurate, then they are fooling not only the outside world, but also China’s own government officials, a highly unlikely scenario.

Migrant Workers are Looking to Find Jobs, Not Start a Revolution

In recent months, numerous notable periodicals have published articles suggesting that mass lay-offs have led to a widespread sentiment of anger and frustration among China’s migrant workers. One prominent example can be found in the Washington Post’s “In China, Despair Mounting Among Migrant Workers,” which quoted one migrant laborer as saying “this is an unfair society” and noted that, as a whole, China’s migrant workers “are becoming desperate.”[6] There are undoubtedly some migrants who feel this way. Anecdotal evidence, however, along with a thorough understanding of the nature of migrant work reveals a migrant class whose sentiments are far from revolutionary.

As a Fulbright Scholar conducting researching in China this past year, I have interviewed numerous unemployed migrants living in areas such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangdong, Suzhou, Nanchang, and rural Henan. Such interviews are striking in that they feature relatively few expressions of anger and desperation. On the contrary, the sentiments most frequently shared by the migrant workers are that a) the government is working to aid China’s migrants and fix the economy, and b) that the downturn will not last long. Though this collection of reactions does not represent empirical evidence demonstrating that no migrant workers are enraged by their plight, it does speak to both the widespread nature of these benign sentiments and the importance of understanding the nature of job loss in the migrant worker’s world.

Migrant work is, by nature, both transitory and nomadic. The disappearance and reappearance of jobs is part of the migrant worker’s reality; one that rarely has a conspicuous underlying logic. While many migrant workers understand that the root of their latest job loss is the economic crisis, their reaction to being laid-off is not changed by the cause of their unemployment. In some extreme cases where corruption and/or fraud led to significant personal financial loss, migrants have engaged in small-scale, short-lived incidents of social unrest. The vast majority, however, have responded to their status as unemployed laborers by finding their bearings in the new economic climate and beginning to search for new work. For the migrant masses, their focus lies neither on their agitation in the wake of the mass-layoffs nor on how the government may have failed to protect them from the effects of the economic crisis. Rather, their efforts are zeroed in on finding a new job, just as they always are when work arrangements fall through.

Migrants Cannot Organize to Incite Large-Scale Unrest

Even if there did exist a widespread sense of anger and frustration among China’s laid-off migrant workers, they are impotent to incite large-scale social unrest. In this regard, they are constrained by both their inability to organize themselves and the fact that no outside group can help them in the organization process.

The geographic distribution of migrant workers alone makes it difficult for them to organize in a way that could lead to collective political action. The waves of workers who returned home this last winter are now disparately located and unlikely to aggregate. Meanwhile, in the cities, where there remains a critical mass of migrant workers, the police and other public security officials are on high alert for potential social unrest, making organization a near impossibility.

Outside forces are also unable to organize the migrant class. In recent years, China has witnessed the proliferation of non-governmental organizations designed to aid and support its migrant workers. These members of China’s adolescent civil society, however, recognize the fragile nature of their existence in the authoritarian PRC. Thus, in an effort to steer clear of any activities that could lead the state to shut them down, they focus on politically innocuous issues such as education and healthcare, staying away from potentially dangerous tasks such as organizing workers and fostering political consciousness among them.

The Chinese Government’s Response to Migrant Unemployment

The above analysis assumes that the government is a passive actor in this situation; that it is not implementing policies to address migrants’ needs. The Chinese government, however, has been anything but passive in responding to the employment crisis. With the central authorities loudly announcing the need for programs to aid jobless migrants, provincial and local governments have launched numerous initiatives designed to ameliorate the concerns of the migrant laborers. Though such aid has come in several different forms, vocational training and entrepreneurship are the two most prominent, both having been endorsed by the powers that be as panaceas to the problem of mass unemployment.

In recent months, Xinhua has repeatedly published articles lauding the importance of vocational education. The titles speak for themselves: “Skills Training Key to Future for China’s Jobless Migrants,” “Vocational Education to Help Laid-off Chinese Workers Find Jobs,” and “Skill Training: A Way to Bail Out Migrant Workers.” The National Development and Reform Commission has followed suit, announcing that a “special program” will be created to increase vocational training for migrant workers in 2009 and 2010.[7] For its part, the Ministry of Education made such promises a little more concrete, stating that vocational schools would enroll 8.6 million new students this year, 500,000 more than in 2008.[8] With the central government leading the push to educate migrants in vocational schools, several provinces have pledged to expand their training institutes. Sichuan has made $11 million in training vouchers available, Guangxi has allocated $35 million to the cause of providing free training to migrant workers, and Anhui has promised to educate at least 50,000 migrant workers this year.[9]

Entrepreneurship, too, has been championed as a solution to migrant woes. The government’s belief that laid-off workers are returning home with practical experience, skills, and capital drives their efforts to convert unemployed migrants into entrepreneurs. In articles such as “Migrant Workers Try Hand at Entrepreneurship in Hometowns,” the state-controlled media celebrates migrants-turned-entrepreneurs, encourages more migrants to make the switch, and calls for local governments to support migrants in such endeavors. Several provinces have rallied to the central government’s battle cry, initiating programs aimed at inspiring migrant workers to consider starting their own enterprises. Henan has pledged $220 million in small loans for peasants to start small businesses. In the same vein, Hunan and Shandong have promised that farmers who start businesses will enjoy tax or fee exemptions for three years.[10]

Though vocational training and entrepreneurship have dominated government efforts to aid migrant workers, some less orthodox methods are also being implemented. At the national level, China Education Television is opening a new channel to offer vocational training and educational services to the masses, with some segments designed explicitly for migrant laborers. Locally, one Zhejiang county is subsidizing migrants’ purchases of tea processing machines and teaching them how to grow tea leaves, while a Jiangxi county is encouraging unemployed migrants to turn to forestry by giving out free tree seeds.[11]

Should these proactive policies not mollify the aggrieved migrant workers, China is counting on its security forces to quell any potential uprisings. In late February, more than 3,000 public security directors gathered in Beijing to “learn how to neutralize rallies and strikes before they blossom into so-called mass incidents.”[12] In addition, several prominent Chinese publications, including Outlook (liaowang), a weekly newsmagazine put out by Xinhua, have warned officials to be prepared to combat social unrest.

On their own, government efforts to aid migrants and stave off social unrest would likely be sufficient to ensure political stability in the PRC. When combined with the ability of migrants to meet their basic needs, their general lack of angst and desperation, and their inability to organize in any meaningful way, the CCP’s handling of the situation renders the prospect of China’s migrant laborers seriously threatening social stability extremely remote.

China’s Migrant Workers Will Inspire, Not Challenge, Future Development

China’s migrant laborers have been the heroes of their country’s long drive toward modernization and will play an integral role in any future development. As a result, any assessments of the PRC’s economic and political trajectory must include an evaluation of the dynamics of China’s migrant labor class. Incomplete examinations of the welfare, sentiments, and abilities of China’s migrants have led many to conclude that they may derail their country’s march forward. A more thorough examination, however, indicates otherwise.

Though China’s migrant workers have undoubtedly been hit hard by the global economic crisis, they seem poised to trudge through their hardships rather than incite large-scale social unrest. The challenges posed by the economic downturn may have left them momentarily wounded, but they appear undeterred in their quest for ever-greater prosperity.

Robert D. O’Brien is a graduate of George Washington University and a current Fulbright Scholar in the People’s Republic of China.

[1] Ray Yep. “Economic Downturn and Instability in China: Time for Political Reform?” Brookings Northeast Asia Commentary, No. 28. April 2009; Austin Ramzy. “Migrant Workers Suddenly Idle in China.” Time Magazine. February 1, 2009; Ariana Cha. “In China, Despair Mounting Among Migrant Workers: Millions Are Without Jobs, Options.” Washington Post. March 4, 2009.
[2] Lu Yanan. “As Job Losses Bite, Unrest Grows in China Province.” Xinhua. February 25, 2009.
“Over 1,000 Workers March on Beijing in Protest Over Job Losses.” Channel News Asia. April 4, 2009.
Peter Foster. “Chinese Worker Blows Himself Up Over Unpaid Wages Claim.” The Telegraph – U.K. April 3, 2009.
[3] “2008 Year End Survey of Migrant Workers.” Chinese Bureau of Statistics. March 25, 2009.
[4] Ramzy, “Migrant Workers Suddenly Idle,” Feb. 1, 2009.
[5] Yep, “Economic Downturn and Instability in China.”
[6] Cha, “In China, Despair Mounting Among Migrant Workers,” March 4, 2009.
[7] Fang Yang. “Government-aided Job Training Helps Migrants Find Work.” Xinhua. February 27, 2009.
[8] “Vocational Education to Help Laid-off Chinese Workers Find Jobs.” Xinhua. March 12, 2009.
[9] Calum MacLeod. “Return of Jobless Strains China.” USA Today. February 16, 2009.
“Skills Training Key to Future for China’s Jobless Migrants.” Xinhua. March 13, 2009.
Lu Yanan. “Migrants’ Mass Return Tests China’s Rural Administrators.” Xinhua. March 5, 2009.
[10] “Hard Road for Chinese Migrants to Start Businesses.” Xinhua. March 31, 2009.
[11] Lu Yanan. “China Launches Satellite TV Channel to Train Students, Teachers and Migrant Workers.” Xinhua. February 25, 2009.
Liu Fang. “Local Governments Help Migrant Workers Find Jobs.” CCTV. March 31, 2009.
[12] Andrew Jacobs. “China Fears Tremors as Jobs Vanish From Coast.” New York Times. February 22, 2009.

Tags: migrant workers, rural China, urban China

Rolling the Dice in Macau

August 11, 2009 in urban China by The China Beat | 2 comments

It has been almost a decade now since China regained control of Macau, but the city’s present and future crops up in news coverage much less than Hong Kong, another reclaimed colony. We’re delighted, then, to be able to run this piece about Macau from someone who has been spending time there, meditating on not only whether or not Macau is democratizing but also how Macau’s relationship to the mainland and the world is changing its economy and society. For those interested in background information on Macau, see the reading list that follows the piece.

By Dustin Wright

Sitting in a hip dessert shop recently, I asked three University of Macau undergraduates, all Macau natives, what they thought about Macau’s new Chief Executive-elect, Fernando Chui. He is only the second person to hold the post since the Portuguese handover in 1999.

“I don’t really think about it,” one told me. “Young people here don’t really think about who is in the government.” The two others nodded in agreement. “Connections are the most important thing to succeed in Macau. Anyone here who is rich was born rich.”

Such apathy can be understood, given that Chui’s appointment as the new head of Macau was decided by a 300-member “election committee” comprised of the city’s elite, many of whom have strong ties to PRC officials. Chui, the former Secretary of Social Affairs and Culture and holder of college degrees from the United States, including a PhD in Public Health from the University of Oklahoma, will be officially sworn in this December. The victory of his unopposed election was a foregone conclusion, emphasized by the fact that The Macau Daily lead with a headline declaring Chui’s victory before the vote actually took place. An online poll at the English language MacauNews.com showed that 44 percent of respondents felt that Chui’s top priority should be combating public corruption, while only 2.3 percent stressed the importance for political reforms. This strong displeasure towards corruption was likely exacerbated by a recent high-profile case involving a former official in Macau, now serving 28 years in prison.

However, not everyone is apathetic toward the election process. On election day, pro-democracy legislators unveiled banners and staged a protest in front of the iconic façade of St. Paul’s ruins, calling for universal suffrage by 2019. The rally hinted at the fact that political (and economic) disparities are just as Macanese as Portuguese egg tarts.

As with the changing of the guard in the Chief Executive’s office, the gaming sector might also be in a state of transition. For nearly four decades, the casino industry has been heavily influenced by one man, the philoprogenitive Stanley Ho, whose failing health has raised speculation as to who will make up (and benefit from) Macau’s next generation of corporatists.

All of this begs the question: What is the Macau that Chui will soon be running?

Macau Special Administrative Region (SAR) is a city of variations, scattered with amalgamations, and permeated with assimilations. Since the sixteenth century, Macau’s seemingly effortless blending of cultures has impressed and marveled those who visited and inhabited this Portuguese outpost on the Pearl River Delta. “Culturally,” writes Austin Coates, “there has never been anything like Macao, where so much of China and so much of Europe are enshrined in one small place.”[1] Wang Zeng Yang, President of the Cultural Institute of Macau, remarked that this is a city “where different cultures are treated not as mere rituals, but instead, as truly symbiotic, as totally complimentary,” and that “even tourists in Taiwan advise their friends if they wish to know Europe but do not want to take long trips, to visit Macau, to know how it feels to be in a European city.”[2] At a very cosmopolitan and Iberian dinnertime of 10:00 p.m., you might find yourself dining on stewed bacalhau (Portuguese salted fish) and African chicken. At the same restaurant the previous night, it was mapo tofu, steamed Chinese broccoli drowned in oyster sauce, and eggplant sautéed in oil and chilies, washed down with milk tea.

Just as identity and cuisine are in constant motion in Macau, so is the movement of capital. Since the handover of Macau back to Chinese rule a decade ago, and the relaxation of monopolistic gaming licenses in 2002, foreign casino operators have set up shop at a dizzying pace. Macau peninsula—along with the islands of Taipa and Coloane—makes up only 29 square kilometers and often goes unnoticed when compared to the larger Hong Kong SAR. However, in terms of generating wealth, size doesn’t matter: Las Vegas is 7.5 times bigger than Macau, yet more money is generated in the SAR than Sin City.

Climbing up the hill to Guia Fortress, one of the many historical sites that pepper the peninsula, one can see much of Macau spread out below. Looking south, the Sands Macao Hotel, which is responsible for fully two thirds of Las Vegas Sands Corp.’s profit, fights for elbow room with a bevy of Chinese and foreign-owned casinos. Large condominium complexes are still being built within sight, though at a slower pace than this time last year. Fisherman’s Wharf, a Disneylandesque amusement park built in the images of famous landmarks and cities, including a mock Coliseum, sits atop 111,500 square meters of concrete along the waterfront. Even Isidoro Francisco Guimarães, governor of Macau from 1851 to 1863 and the first to introduce licensed gambling, could hardly have imagined the garishness of the city today.

To the west, towards the central business district of Macau, one can see the immense and lotus-shaped Grand Lisboa rising from a sea of comparatively diminutive casinos, along with banks, shopping malls, pastel-colored cathedrals, and apartment blocks. Nearby, a towering needle, complete with a rotating restaurant and bar, confirms Macau’s ascension as a tourist haven. Wynn Macau is visible, a casino as much as a high-end shopping bonanza for tourists, most of whom come from mainland China. An American expat working in Macau told me about his experience watching a man, who was half-naked and sweating profusely, struggle to fit into a shirt while standing in the middle of Wynn’s Giorgio Armani store. I asked why the store personnel would allow such behavior, to which the expat, shocked by my ignorance, replied without pause, “Because he had money.” (When Henry Kissinger came to Macau a few months ago to speak at Macao Polytechnic University, his old friend, Steve Wynn, made sure to come to listen and, perhaps, comped the former Secretary of State’s room at the Wynn Macau.)

On a clear day you can catch a glimpse of a smattering of islands to the east, the largest of which is Lantau, part of Hong Kong SAR, while to the north is the city of Zhuhai, gateway to Guangdong Province and mainland China, visible from much of Macau. Travelling between the SARs and the mainland ensures one’s passport is stamped with the frequency of a pre-EU jaunt through Europe.

It’s a small city, yes, but the numbers are big. Macau’s population is roughly 560,000, nearly identical to that of Las Vegas. With such a small land area, Macau is one of the mostly densely populated places on earth. Government figures indicate that 23 million people visited Macau in 2008 and helped the city generate nearly $22 billion in GDP. With so many visitors spending so much money, Macau is a city that truly never sleeps.

The massive expansion of Macau’s gaming industry dovetailed with the global real estate gorge of the last decade, giving way to a bevy of expensive condominium projects, followed by the subsequent drop in market prices late last year. In Senado Square, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a lodestone for tourists, the young professionals who bought many of those condos bark into Blackberries and loosen their European-brand ties, while tourist families vie for space to take their portraits in front of the picturesque St. Dominic’s Church. Macau’s overall standard of living is quite high, with a quality-of-life index comparable to Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong.

However, even with the huge influx of capital (or because of it), economic inequality is prevalent. Not far away from Senado Square, in an area known as Fátima Parish, lies a rusted and mosquito-infested slum, where elderly women can be seen washing dishes at a communal spigot. It isn’t a unique example of poverty in greater China, but it’s proximity to the corporatist wealth of the casinos makes the disparity all the more egregious. Inoperable cars sit on blocks as they are slowly parted out, while above, a messy labyrinth of wires indicates that much of electricity that people can access in this area is pirated. It is a squatter community of mostly mainland Chinese immigrants, some of whom entered Macau illegally but were later granted legal status. Until 1979, Chinese mainlanders could enter Macau without restriction, though it was illegal for them to do so under PRC law. Portuguese administrators tacitly endorsed the immigration of Chinese mainlanders, eager to have a ready supply of cheap labor that could be easily repatriated once their labor had been exploited.

Fatima Parish. Photo by Erica Hashiba.
The size of the slum has been halved since 1991, mostly through government campaigns to tear down the shacks and build high-rise housing and commercial buildings, evicting many of the squatters once their labor had been utilized to build the more expensive new real estate. Today, these towers loom over the shacks of corrugated tin that remain. Even though the slum is physically smaller and stronger immigration laws have made it more difficult for mainlanders to come to Macau, squatters are just as essential for today’s labor demands as they were twenty years ago. Sociologist D.Y. Yuan, a longtime researcher of Macau’s immigrant community, writes that, “Squatters have continuously provided a cheap source of labor, helping Macau to remain competitive in the international trade market.”[3] Last year’s census indicates that there was an increase of 8.2 percent in the number of “non-resident workers,” making up a population of over 92,000, many of whom have less than a junior high school education. Most of these workers are not salaried staff in the casinos (jobs which can require expensive training) but are instead employed in construction and more vulnerable to the global recession. When the economic crisis hit last fall, many ambitious building projects were shuttered and thousands in the construction industry lost their jobs.

For those lucky enough to have kept their jobs in the casinos, gaming is still profitable, even though the number of tourists has decreased (due in part to travel restrictions by Beijing and the curtailing of gambling by PRC officials). Direct gaming tax revenue doubled from 2006 to 2008 to nearly $5 billion and many of the Macau government’s 20,000 employees can expect a pay raise this year. For the slums in Fátima Parish, things will likely remain the same.

The hotel Lan Kwai Fong. Photo by Erica Hashiba.
It remains to be seen whether Chief Executive-elect Chui will be able to oversee the level of prosperity heralded during the last decade, or indeed whether Macau can remain a global gambling Mecca. For some, surely, things could be worse. Down the street from my apartment, I recently happened upon the opening party for a new hotel. On the street where I stood, looking rather pathetic with my mouth agape, throngs of people queued for admittance, while glittery VIP couples seemed to prance in slow motion as they made their way to the front of the line. Up above us, the silhouettes of a dozen voluptuous women—paid performers—gyrated in the windows of the new hotel. A powerful sound system blasted Depeche Mode’s “Personal Jesus” throughout the neighborhood, inviting all of Macau to find “someone to hear your prayers, someone who cares.”

This fall, Dustin Wright will begin his doctoral studies in the Department of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

From the China Beat Archives

With more than 750 posts at China Beat, a glance at something from our archives.

“The Chinese Typewriter”
By Thomas S. Mullaney
May 14, 2009

“For over a hundred years, writers in the United States and Europe have derived a unique sense of cultural and technological superiority by portraying the apparatus as absurdly large, painfully slow, and prohibitively complex.

Others have simply assumed that the machine never existed—that it is a mechanical impossibility, and thus, that China is incapable of reaching a level of modernity equal to the West for the simple reason that Chinese characters are inherently incompatible with modern technology.

Contrary to media representations, however, the past century has witnessed the development of nearly five dozen different models of Chinese typewriter, each one representing an ever more sophisticated attempt at solving a puzzle that makes the more familiar QWERTY typewriter look like child’s play: the puzzle of how to fit a non-alphabetic language containing tens of thousands of characters on an apparatus of a manageable size and a user-friendly design.”