Company towns still exist in China. Heck, I think my wife owns a duplex in an education related development her father worked for. Full blown SOE company towns (not just buildings or neighborhoods) are stranger but then again employment is pretty much guaranteed for life (iron rice bowl) if you get to live there.
Many of them, yes. Keep in mind, too, though that there are places like Shenzen. It's grown an order of magnitude in 40 years and was designated as a specific enterprise zone. It was a market town. Now it's an electronics manufacturing powerhouse.
I'm pretty sure there are things in between a village and one of the few cities with a Chinese community so large and concentrated that someone can live a completely Chinese life.
I see loads and loads of empty ghost towns, when I drive to the factory every two weeks in China..
They're not filling up right now. Even the city where the factory is located seems very deserted (big almost empty roads) except inside the factory compound, where all the factory workers live and work..
To others, like myself, that's just a couple of buildings.
But I'm just parroting the term "sleepy village" [1] because that's what I've heard Shenzhen described at before it became the the world's manufacturing powerhouse. And it happened all during my lifetime.
Yeah. Writing from front-window home-office here: I live in China. The windows is open and the view is greenery, there are birds chirping, with only distant hum from city noise, and the occasional walker-by. Every time my brother, an urban designer, comes to visit he comments on how intelligent and high-density the cities are here. Very human scale, though they're losing a lot to cars these days. Hanoi is another great one.
Anyway our team is 3 right now, we use the lounge room and large TV for meetings and stuff, the office is mostly heads-down space and storage. The last company I started here in China about 8 years ago was in a similar (ground floor, 3 bedroom) apartment, and we had something like 10 people at times. Never any complaints. I lived there too initially, but moved out to dedicate the space to the company after awhile.
That chimes with my experience travelling in China a lot in the late 80s and early 90s. I was travelling on business sometimes as much as two months at a time and working closely with local people installing and debugging machinery in factories. One of the most interesting places was Jiexi in south China four hours on a dirt road from the nearest airport. Most of the houses were rammed earth but the place had a lively market (it was a 'small' town of about 30k people) and a substantial concrete multi-story overseas Chinese hotel where we stayed. The hotel lobby was one of the few places in town that had a television so it was always crowded with locals watching it. In conversations with people there (mostly through our interpreter) it was clear that the ambitions of most people there were much the same as where I come from (UK but living in Norway); they want a house to live in, a fridge, a washing machine, a television, a decent income, and a better life for their children.
A city for one million residents is very small for China. Most of the time such a place would only be called a village. I lived in another ghost city in China for a few months. Suddenly, over night the city filled up and everyone was told they must work in a certain industry. Previously there was some other small industry (e.g. a shipping company with a few trucks with using the street as a warehouse and local services like a laundry mat). They were all kicked out because they were not the designated industry. The laundry mat re-opened a few weeks later on another street.
People forget that China is a command economy. The government tells you where to live and what to do. If you want to live somewhere else or do something else you need to apply for permission from the government.
Cities like Ordos shouldn't make anyone blink. Once the government knows what it wants to do it will be filled overnight.
Fantastic. I live in Dalian, and have done for around 10 years.
The city has changed - that's why I dropped an alternate career - to see what newspapers were writing about in the mid-2000s, about China's rise.
Dalian is not unique in this respect. Cities across the seaboard and a select few more inland are all doing the same thing.
But is it a bubble? Yes, it is, but in a strange kind of way. 10 years ago there was one software park with around 12 buildings and a local college. Now, that software park has 30+ buildings, and there are an additional 3 software parks located further from the city center all larger than it.
The industrial development zone was a road with a bar district and a few 24 hour restaurants (many nearby factories operate round-the-clock shifts), a couple of hotels, and several large lots filled by largely Japanese corporations. Now it is a city of 1 million+ itself, a city on the edge of the city.
10 years ago there were also a lot of empty buildings, all of which are now full. When you visited you probably noticed a lot of high-density housing near the newer office and industrial districts. The local government makes around 1/2 of its revenue (highly trusted word of mouth) from land sales to developers, who in-turn make their profit from the workers that fill these hugely subsided commercial buildings, including the cost of the subway and subsidising busses.
What's the core driver for this?
Jobs for educated people from rural areas who have no hope nor desire to work on the farm or in the rural town. Their family will invest all they have on ensuring their child 'makes it' with a stable job at a big-name company in a clean city. As long as the jobs are coming, the city is sustainable.
For Dalian, a lot of jobs have stopped coming over the past 1-2 years (4-5 years ago was boom-time, especially in BPO and ITO) and construction considerably slowed, but these are cyclical. Somewhere else a city is allowing companies to enjoy lower taxes (a lot of incentives in Xi'an, Chengdu, Chongqing for 'soft' jobs where the export is electronic in the form of email and SVN and not hindered by these cities' physical locations), and the boom is happening there, and the city is making money despite the tax breaks it's offering. It's a bubble, for sure, but it's being juggled.
I wouldn't call Xiamen a "town" or a "village." My cousin lives there with his wife and two children. It has a population of over 2.5 million people, and was voted (by whom, IDK) one of the "most livable cities in China." He worked for EDS for years and wanted to be transfered to China because of how much he loved it. When they wouldn't transfer him, he FOUND a way to move there. He ended up building a factory there to manufacture leather goods. Get the best leather he can from N&S America, and manufactures it there. He now has hundreds of employees, many with some form of disability, and is incredibly happy.
So I wouldn't call Xiamen itself a village, but you may be referring to a small village nearby.
> The Huafu Textile Company is located on the edge of a grey industrial estate in the city of Huaibei, in China's eastern province of Anhui.
I more or less grew up in the states, but this is the exact town I was born in, and grey couldn't be a better description for it. It was a mining town when I was little, and I recall trainloads of coal being taken out of tunnels in the mountains, very West Virginia feel to it.
I was in Shenzhen a few weeks ago. It's indeed a wonderful city.
Originally the massive manufacturing industry was accelerated by the large amount of people from rural areas flocking into the city due to reform and opportunities. The increase in population resulted in a large unskilled workforce and thus very cheap manual labour and large factory assembly lines.
It's a lot better now given a much more competitive market. Salaries are higher and quality of living is better than the rest of the country. A lot of people became very rich in Shenzhen within the last decade.
I just got back from Shanghai last week. Curious urban planning-- whatever you want, there's a street for it. My personal favorites: the industrial supply street, dye street, and the outdoor (!) air-conditioner market.
One of the side effects of this policy (pointed out to me by an architect acquaintance) was that when you go to the new "residential" areas (post-1985 or so), there is literally nothing but residential nearby. No stores, no cafes, maybe a kede (chain convenience store) if you're lucky. This is in stark contrast to the older, more integrated shikumen/hutong style of living, where residential and commercial are well-integrated (see nick ourossof's article in the nytimes about the demise of the hutong in Beijing).
reply