Beyond the Starchitects

As a rule, the British are not supposed to like high rises. We have always preferred gardens on the ground to streets in the sky, it is alleged. Tower blocks are said to be a 'failed experiment', dumping grounds for a particularly lumpen proletariat. Things have been changing over the last decade or so: Ernő Goldfinger's Brutalist Trellick Tower has been rehabilitated as a London Landmark and Denys Lasdun's Keeling House sold off as luxury flats. Out with the council house, in with the penthouse. Thus the New Labourthatcher 'urban regeneration' paradise. Though, of course, no one who has read J.G. Ballard's High Rise can be entirely comfortable with the thought of living in a luxury tower block. Ballard's account of middle-class meltdown starts as it means to go on with one of the best first lines in literature: 'Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months.'

Tower blocks seem rather different in China. In Wang Meng's story Kite Streamers, first published in 1980 and set in Beijing, high rise living is altogether more human. He describes two young lovers and their difficulties finding somewhere private, since they have no apartment of their own. While out walking together they are caught in a storm and finally find an empty, newly-finished fourteen-storey apartment block where they take shelter. They climb up to the top floor and it is 'as though they had reached paradise'. They have discovered their private place where they can hold hands and whisper to each other. The ordinary high rise is sexy.

Photos of Beijing from the first half of the twentieth century show the Drum and Bell Towers rising above a sea of pingfang (single storey buildings). The 50s and 60s brought 5 and 6 storey apartment blocks, but Beijing before the Reform and Opening remained a largely low-rise city. It was at the end of the 1970s that high-rise apartment buildings began to be constructed. Some of these older ones are oddly charming; bold shapes with none of the bombast of the recent starchitect contributions. I like the way the yangtai (enclosed balconies) typical of Chinese apartments are missing on some of them, and the window frames don't match.

I'm not quite sure what these great greenhouses on top are:

Penthouses for cadres? Or probably, more prosaically, boiler rooms, as in the Trellick Tower:

(photo:pyrsokomos)

Beijing's first generation high rises are a lot more flimsy than the British Brutalist masterpieces, and there would certainly be a Channel 4 programme devoted to their destruction were they in Britain, but I hope they're not all going to be knocked down and replaced by nickname architecture (The Bird's Nest, The Egg, The Gherkin).

More than Two Chinas

I watched 'Piers Morgan On Shanghai' on ITV the other night. I wanted to see how they handled Shanghai, and I am drawn to anything in which Morgan is involved - a fascination of the abomination. There were all sorts of problems here, many stemming from the fact that Morgan is one of the most irritating people in the world. Skilled in the art of utter boorishness, he is the man I would least like to have representing my country to China. 'When I think of shipping tycoons, they don't normally look like you', he leered at a young businesswoman. He found a self-raising toilet seat very funny. While helping to drill a new subway tunnel (why did they let him?) he quipped 'I'm literally boring Shanghai'. Ha!

The programme was packed with the expected cliches: Shanghai is 'the capitalist playground that the rest of this socialist state aspires to'. It's 'the gateway to the world'. There is 'a tension between ancient East and modern West.' Time lapse photography and taiqi. Shiny skyscrapers and dirty alleys. Cadillacs and condemned homes. Tycoons and the evicted urban poor. Shanghai is where, opined Morgan, 'the super rich and the desperately poor live together in this vast, smouldering cauldron'.

I wonder when the popular image of China in Britain is going to move beyond the simplistic dichotomy of superwealth vs. huddled masses. It's been a staple in images of China for over 20 years now - the peasant cycling past the skyscraper. This is not to dismiss the extremes of wealth that currently exist in China. In fact, the potentially most interesting point of the programme came when Morgan was chillin' with some successful female entrepreneurs and asked one of them which Western brands her company made clothes for. She was embarassed and giggled and said she was contractually obliged not to say. It all got a bit awkward, and behind the awkwardness was the elephant in the room that Morgan refused even to glance at: Why was she a 'successful entrepreneur'? Why can't she reveal which companies she works for? Because she's exploiting the labour of migrant workers from Anhui, one presumes.

There are clearly thousands more important stories to be told about China than the fascinations of the Shanghai rich with Barbie dolls, but having a few token scenes where Morgan stands outside a condemned house and talks about 'capitalist winners and socialist losers' does not qualify as balanced journalism. Nor does briefly mentioning a lack of independent trade unions and then spending five minutes discussing the popularity of foie gras. Perhaps one can't ask much of ITV, but you do see similar stuff in more respectable places.




These hoary old journalistic motifs ignore the majority of urban residents who are neither forelock-tugging migrant workers nor plutocrats mispronouncing luxury car names while smoking cigars in champagne jacuzzis. If ITV really want to show that the Chinese are 'just like us', they would be better off leaving Xintiandi and its fluent English-speaking sophisticates who know who Simon Cowell is.

In fact, ITV would have done much better to subtitle and screen an episode of 蜗居 ('Dwelling Narrowness' as it's horribly translated). There's a Wall Street Journal piece on it from a while back here, and one on China Hush here.

It's a Chinese soap opera about the problems of middle-class residents of a pseudonymous city, clearly Shanghai. These aren't the kind of foreign-educated shipping magnates Morgan banters with in English in the ITV programme, but white-collar workers with degrees from Chinese universities. In the midst of China's housing bubble they find themselves unable to get a foot on a property ladder. House prices feature heavily in the dialogue which often gets a bit wooden. The Daily Mail would like these bits. However it gets much better: there is sex with corrupt officials, marital breakdown and familial estrangement. It's bleak (so far, at least - I'm only half way through). So close to the bone is it, that, reportedly, the government stopped it from being screened on TV before the series had finished.

I can imagine it being screened here late night on Channel 4 (or perhaps the Channel 4 of 15 years ago), but I wish ITV would run it instead of Morgan. It might be quite popular; it certainly touches on an issue close to many middle-class hearts in Britain. (I meant house prices, though after Mrs Robinson-gate, perhaps there are others...). It might also mean we could increase our collective understanding of China a fraction. Surely Morgan and others would approve of this, since they seem so worried about China 'taking over the world'.

The Yellow Emperor's New Clothes

Recently I've been looking at hanminzu.com, a website which promotes Han ethnic identity. It is interesting to see that on it there is a large section about Han traditional clothing (汉服), since costume is one of the ways in which minorities in China are commonly distinguished from the Han. They wear the funny clothes, the Han dress normally.

I remember the new subway line 4 in Beijing had (perhaps still does have) an accompanying advertising series in the stations which featured portraits of people from around China. The minorities wore 'traditional' costume, while the Han were dressed in office or casual wear. What is more, while every portrait bore the name of the person and their location in China, the Han ones gave their profession but not their minzu, while the minority ones gave their minzu but not their profession. The Han have careers while the minorities have 'minority-ness'.

These 'family portraits of all 56 ethnic groups' have been doing the rounds. While the artsy lighting is new, there is much that is familiar here to anyone who has watched Chinese TV or browsed through Chinese National Geographic-type publications. As expected, the minorities are wearing their nice pretty costumes, even if the Bonan, Hui and Dongxiang men aren't really getting into the multicoloured spirit of things. Of course, their white hats and dark jackets hint at the many problems that lie behind the neatness of the "China = 56 nationalities" equation. Take the Hui, for example: since they are only really distinguished from the Han by their Muslim heritage, they don't lend themselves to the simplistic colourful costume/ethnic difference paradigm that is so common in representations of ethnic identity in China.

It's interesting to see the Han making an appearance, though. I initially thought they wouldn't get a look in, much as the Han zone at the Beijing Nationalities Park ( 中华民族园) was still 'under construction' when I last went. So what are they wearing? There seem to be quite a few qipao in evidence; some suitably old-school proletarian clothing for the chap on the far left; what look like the clothes you wear in Citizen Kane's newsroom for the man in front of him; and a great retro-chic polkadot skirt for the little girl. I'm personally very glad to see buxie (traditional cloth shoes) poking out from quite a few trousers, as I regard them, along with printing, gunpowder and pasta (discuss), as one of the finest Chinese inventions.

I can imagine the photographer asking the minorities to 'wear those traditional clothes, you know, the ones off the TV'. I can't imagine him saying the same to the Han family. The lack of an agreed 'traditional' dress for the Han here is again much as expected (see Beijing subway adverts). One might point out that while the minorities are made 'other' by their exotic dress, the Han family, who must be made to fit in with the genre of this photoessay, are here made other by their old-fashioned dress: 'time-exotic', perhaps, where the minority families are 'place-exotic'. The exotic minorities are figured as inherently backward (backwardness being the flipside of pretty clothes and exciting dances), whereas the Han family must become backward by donning the clothes of generations past.

So while this photo project claims to be a celebration of 'Harmonious China', it is really testament to the continuing importance of ideas of social evolution, found in the writings 19th Century ethnologists such as Lewis H. Morgan, for the way in which minorities, and their relation to the Han, are viewed in China. Of course these ideas, entering China via Marx, are mixed up with traditional Chinese ideas of civilization vs. barbarism (inside and outside the Great Wall).

I'm interested, then, to see the traditional 'Han' clothing on hanminzu.com. I'm not going to stir up a hornet's nest by suggesting that these clothes, to the untrained eye, rather suggest the Korean 'traditional' costume. (yes, yes, I'm sure the Koreans got the idea from China). What I think is interesting is that there is a dress that is seen (by some) as explicity Han and traditional, and that people are wearing it and taking photos of people wearing it.

I must now declare that, as an Englishman, national costumes make me feel uneasy. Much of this feeling must stem from once seeing (by accident, on TV) a Miss World competiton in which a Scottish Lass was dressed very-Scottishly (apologies Hugh Trevor-Roper) in a kilt, while the English Rose was dressed as one of those royal guards with half a bear on their head. At the time I felt a bit jealous that England didn't have a national costume, though I've since recovered. (simplistic parallels between English identity in the UK and Han identity in China, anyone?)





Ultimately I think the aim of national unity (minzu tuanjie) would be better served if the depiction of minorities was more nuanced than funny costumes/energetic dances. However, if funny costumes are going to be around for a while, I think it's probably a positive thing if the Han wear them too. It seems a bit less patronizing than the vision of big brother Han, furthest down the road of social evolution, looking back in bemusement at the minorities, still mired in backwardness. Bring on the traditional Han dance revival.