Cleaning the streets of crime was another urban challenge. In many Chinese cities, the public security bureau was more likely to detain journalists than to take them for a drive. But in Chongqing, the city went so far as to dispatch an English-speaking officer, Lai Hansong, as a guide. I was suspicious that he was just another propaganda official, but Lai insisted he was a regular beat cop who had been patrolling the Yuzhang district for six years. “It is a low-crime area,” he said. “We mostly deal with thefts or fights.” In an average week, he claimed, he dealt with fewer than five incidents.
It was not what I expected, having heard lurid stories of drugs, prostitution, and organized crime. The city had recently been the focus of violent industrial protest, and conflicts over land appropriation were common as the city expanded.23
The picture Lai painted was very different: “There are no criminal gangs in China. Our country has few riots.” But someone was clearly worried about something. The police force, Lai said, was increasing every year and officers had to travel three to a car. Not long after, Chongqing was rocked by one of the biggest crackdowns on “black society” mobsters in modern Chinese history. Six gangsters were sentenced to death for murder, machete attacks, and price fixing. Investigators detained more than 1,500 suspects, including the deputy chief of police.24
For dinner, I went to meet some of the city’s alternative thinkers at a riverside restaurant. This was a city that dazzled when night fell. The swirling surface of the Yangtze reflected a neon rainbow, brightly illuminated housing blocks, art deco skyscrapers, and motorway crash barriers that, for no apparent reason, glowed pink, green, and purple.
My dinner companions included a film director, a publisher, a poet/ cartoonist, and an environmentalist. They laughed at the notion that there were no gangsters, and some shook their heads at claims that the haze was just bad weather. Overall, they felt living standards were improving. Cultural development might be slower than material development, “but this is a city of the future,” said Li Gong, the poet/cartoonist.
“Compared with ten years ago, the air quality is better. But compare it with other cities in China or other countries and we are still far behind,” said Wu Dengming, an environmental activist who founded the Green Volunteer League and helped expose the illegal chemical emissions by local factories and pollution buildup behind the Three Gorges Dam.
Zeng Lei, a documentary filmmaker who spent seven years recording the lives of Chongqing’s poorest residents, related unhappy anecdotes of urban life: the
Song Wei, a publisher, noted that the evident problems—pollution, loss of heritage, inequality, and crime— were not confined to Chongqing: “We could be talking about almost any city in China.”
The similarity of China’s cities was a legacy of Stalinist state planning and a sign that aesthetics and heritage preservation were low priorities. During the Mao era, much of the nation’s building stock was hastily thrown up according to a tiny handful of designs.25 The economic reform period was barely any better. Although there was more variety, the rushed spirit of that age meant the quality of design and construction were often awful. At the county level, this created a tatty and tedious urban landscape of almost identical rectangular structures decorated with the same white tiles and tinted windows. As China became wealthier, cities looked to international architects for inspiration, but that often meant urban landscapes came to resemble those overseas rather than having their own distinct identity. Qiu Baoxing, the vice minister of construction, said the damage done to the nation’s architectural heritage was similar to that inflicted during the Cultural Revolution. “Many cities have a similar construction style. It is like a thousand cities having the same appearance,”26 he complained.
Chongqing was not just urbanizing, it was globalizing. Little more than a generation earlier, this had been a city where Red Guards in Mao tunics chanted anti-imperialist slogans. Today, young people with money dressed much like their counterparts in Birmingham, Chicago, or Nagoya. If anything, their values were even more materialistic and consumption-oriented.
After dinner, Spider-Man’s boss, He Qing, took me to Falling, which he described as the hottest nightspot in Chongqing. It was Wednesday night, but the dance floor was packed with beautiful people moving to techno music and playing dice. Our table had an 800 yuan ($114) minimum charge, which covered a bottle of vodka, a few imported beers, and a plate of elegantly carved fruit.
He Qing introduced me to some of Chongqing’s new rich, including the founder of a candy factory, a restaurant owner, and a bank employee. Without exception they were in their twenties, foreign-educated, and well connected—either through family or political ties—with the city’s movers and shakers. “No businessman can thrive unless they have contacts in the Communist Party and the underworld,” I was told.
I felt uneasy spending more on a night’s entertainment than
I felt sure he would make a killing. Chongqing was growing richer, more densely populated, and more environmentally stressed.27 The city government said it would pioneer green urbanization. The city ought to look cleaner and brighter as its population prospers. If the urban middle class followed the trend of the West, they might start to eat more eco-friendly vegetarian food and drive smaller cars. Perhaps. More usually, though, cities tend to distance people from the environment and nurture an unsustainable lifestyle. Metropolises are giant blocks of consumption. Their buildings are fitted with air conditioners and modern conveniences that create an artificial climate. Vertical living represents a shift in consciousness from the horizontal, seasonal life of the farmer to a linear drive for progress. Urban residents laugh at farmers, whose lives go around in circles, never getting anywhere, simply following the seasons. City dwellers, on the other hand, pursue career tracks, expect their lives to be endlessly onward and upward. They tend to measure success by how much they can consume. In the future, as resources grow scarcer, more are likely to be left unfulfilled.
There are signs too that people might be turning their backs on the cities. In Guangdong, which was the first to attract an influx of rural laborers to its factories, companies have begun to complain about worker shortages. Some economists believe China is approaching the Lewis turning point, at which demand for labor outstrips supply.28 The lure of the city had its limits.
Outside at midnight, the bright lights could not mask a seedier side of city life. Many migrant women worked as prostitutes in karaoke bars or massage parlors. Their children were left with relatives or sent to the streets to beg, sell flowers, or sing for money until the early hours. At a night market, a queue of hawkers offered to clean my shoes, sell me cigarettes, or pour me soup from a flask. A seven-year-old girl plucked at my arm and coyly entreated me to buy a rose from her. “Where is your mother?” I asked. “Oh, she’s at work,” she replied.
A desperate-looking girl came over, carrying a menu of songs and a battered, badly tuned guitar. She said she was sixteen but looked more like twelve. She told me she had been in Chongqing only a few months and had already decided she did not like it. I paid 3 yuan (44 cents) and picked the song “Pengyou” (Friend). The young busker stared at some faraway point as she strummed the one chord she knew and sang out of tune. It was miserably sad.
Farther along the street, a
8. Shop Till You Drop
Shanghai was a vast engine of illusions of various kinds. Venture capitalism going full blast twenty-four hours a day.
