September 7, 2010
Grand City Hotel
5:22 am
I woke up at 4am this morning and I couldn't get back to sleep.
First impression of China: It is dirty.
I really didn't expect it to be so dirty. I mentioned in my entries last summer that I though Hong Kong was very dirty. The smog was seemingly palpable; buildings dripped with layers of solidified pollution; the streets were lined with mysterious liquid runoff. But compared to the area I am in now, Hong Kong is a dream.
Driving from the plant to the hotel, we travel through streets lined with dirt-floored shacks with one light bulb hanging from the ceiling. The rooms are opened with garage-like doors... a voyeur's dream.
Last night we left the plant around 9pm. The day shift had just ended and people flooded the streets and alley ways. When we emerged from the plant, we found that our driver had not yet arrived. We stood and waited outside the plant gates.
Groups of shirtless young men, cigarettes casually dangling from their lips, started to gather to stare at us. Being blonde and fair-skinned is a tough thing to hide. We climbed into the van when it arrived, but it was difficult to leave. Workers mill about the streets, unwilling to move for traffic, staring into our car.
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Not long before arriving in China I read the book "Oracle Bones" by Peter Hessler. Hessler is an American who has lived and worked in China for many years. In the book, he explains that until 1980 the Chinese government was reluctant to develop the region where Shenzhen is today. The government worried that because the region is located so close to Hong Kong, the "capitalist British colony" would contaminate China's communist beliefs.
But in the late 1970s the Chinese government developed Special Economic Zones: An experiment to develop areas quickly by offering tax breaks and investment privileges to foreign investors.
In the book, published in 2006, Hessler writes:
The government's development of the city was simple and straightforward: build infrastructure, invite foreign investment, and attract migrants. In two decades the city's population exploded from around three hundred thousand to more than four million people. . . . The average resident was less than 29 years old; there were few elderly people.
Shenzhen was the only place in China with a modern city wall. It was about ten feet high, and made of chain link; some sections were topped by barbed wire. The entire structure was sixty-seven miles long. If you approached the city from the north you entered one of the wall's checkpoints and followed a modern highway through low green hills.
Despite the leaders' attempts to define and delineate their experiment, certain aspects of Shenzhen developed in their own way. The region came to be dominated by labor-intesive light industry, and factory managers preferred female workers, who could be paid less and were easier to manage. . . Locals often claimed that the ratio was seven women to every man. Shenzhen became famous for prostitution and also for its "second wives," the mistresses of factory owners who already had families in Hong Kong or Taiwan.
The plant where Sarah and I printed the book was not within the walls of Shenzhen (actually, I am not sure if the fence is still up around the city.)
Attempts at border control had unintended consequences. Many factories moved to the other side of the Shenzhen fence, where they took advantage of cheaper land and less rigorous law enforcement. The Shenzhen area became divided into two worlds, which were described by residents as guannei and guanwai, "within the gates" and "beyond the gates."
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