Spend any time in urban China, and you'll see it: the blinding speed with which urban landscapes change. Leave a city for a year, and upon your return you might find your favorite hangouts missing. Or that the city has begun to construct a new transit line. Or has added a train station. Or a stadium. Leave a city for a few years, and the entire city may have changed beyond your recognition. The magnitude of these transformations routinely catches the attention of scholars, journalists, pundits and casual observers alike. And in some respects, these descriptions of China becoming an urbanized country seem like well trodden territory. Less, frequently, however, do these reports really discuss what China's urbanization means as a practice. The associated issues with urbanization get lots of attention: migrant labor, increased air pollution, speculation, ghost towns, rich-poor gaps, etc. But a basic discussion of how urbanization works would perhaps illuminate why these outcomes matter, and what significance they hold.
So, that's where we jump in today. I often tell people I'm studying issues associated with urban renewal. That's a rather vague answer, I'll grant. What does that mean? Urbanization here takes a lot of different forms. There are efforts to develop smaller cities by expanding them. These processes usually mean construction of highways, power grids, local roads, new housing developments where there was previously only countryside, etc. For some areas, like southwestern province of Yunnan, a place with incredible geographic, environmental and ethnic diversity, the focus of modernization includes building up new industries like tourism or speciality commodity production (e.g. high end teas, or ethnic minority arts and handicraft, etc.). The efforts to remake local economies and alter cityscapes in these regions recieved a lot of support and attention in the early part of the last decade. In 2000, the central government launched a massive "Develop the West" campaign, aimed at bringing modernization projects like these to China's relatively underdeveloped periphery. The efficacy of these efforts is debatable, 15 years later, it's not clear that attempts to transform the interior of the country has really done anything to reduce regional income inequality, or catch poorer regions (e.g. Yunnan, and Guizhou in China's southwest, or Qinghai and Gansu in China's northwest) up to the more prosperous east coast.
But beyond this project of bringing "modernity" and urbanizing forces to the peripheral regions of west China, there are other forms of urban development that touch even the relatively prosperous and developed coastal regions of the country. These practices involve upgrades or improvement in existing infrastructure, and repurposing of existing spaces. This, specifically, is what I'm referring to when I discuss urban renewal in China. Most commonly, this works through a process referred to as chai qian (拆迁), or "demolish and relocate." The pattern is pretty simple. Existing buildings, usually older or slightly delapidated structures (very often single story houses called pingfang 平房) are marked for demolition. Sometimes residents are given the opportunity to relocate to newly constructed buildings (usually high-rise style apartments) in a one-to-one switch. This practice was more common earlier in the decade. Now, residents are more likekly to recieve compensation for the value of their residence, which may be used to find somewhere else to live. Houses marked to be demolished are easy to spot. They often bear the character chai (拆), demolish. Like this:
After the buildings are razed, any number of developments may follow. The site may become a bridge. Or a rail station. Or an office tower. Or a shopping mall. Or luxury condos. In this way, old urban infrastructure gives way to new. On other circumstances (especially if the homes in question are examples of traditional architecture), old buildings are repaired and repurposed as commercial or tourist districts. Beijing's Nanluogu Xiang (南锣鼓巷) area, where traidtional courtyards have been transformed into juice bars, cafes, t-shirt shops, restaurants, etc. may be the prime example of a place that has gone from oridnary neighborhood to tourist mecca in only a few short years.
In either case, the city's infrastructural grid turns over, and urban landscapes change. So, what exactly is the controversy here all about? First, chai qian affects mostly lower income citizens living in low-value property. Older houses that are slightly more run-down or have potential for having higher real-estate value, residents are usually unable to afford to live in the new housing that springs up in the area. On some occasions, the stipend or compensation former residents recieve is insufficient for covering the costs of living in other, lower-priced areas. A common complaint stemming from these processes are that compensation rates do not relfect the real value of property, especially when factors like location, cultural heritage, marketability, etc. are considered. I also frequently hear locals complain that the shopping malls, Starbucks, Haagen Das, or high-end foreigner targeting cafe that springs up where their home used to be is something from which they draw no material benefit or usefulness. Residents express little need for import beer and overpriced coffee.
In my own work, such concerns often are connected with the vibrancy of the Hui community. In a recent interview with the imam of a Beijing mosque, the subject of chai qian arose. He had been discussing the history of the local Hui community. "When we Hui first arrived here in the Yuan Dynasty (starting in rough 1271), this area was all grasslands and rivers. The Hui people were farmers who raised horses and sheep. Eventually, about 400 years ago, during the Ming Dynasty we built this mosque." "What about now?" I asked. "What do the people here do for work? They obviosuly aren't still raising horses." The Imam sighed. "Truthfully, there aren't as many Hui here as there used to be. After chai qian they've all gone off to different places." He continued to explain the cultural impact of the change in the neighborhood. "A lot of our local traditions have been lost," he said. "We used to have our own local Hui dialect which used a lot of Arabic words. But it's been lost." He is far from the only one to express this sense of loss. Others have made similar remarks. Chai Qian is frequently rhetorically linked to a decline in Hui identity.
But not always. A recent interview with another contact about the recent evolution of NiuJie, Beijing's largest Hui neighborhood, provided a much different observation. "I think NiuJie is a lot more lively than it used to be," my contact explained. "It used to be a pretty cold place. Before it was all just pingfang near the mosque. If it wasn't Friday, and people weren't coming to pray, there was nothing going on. Now, there are a lot of business and restaurants. There are a lot of choices, and things to do. It's much more lively now." Such is the difficulty with chai qian. It may lead to a decline in the local community, and lead to the loss of local tradition. Equally, however, it may provide a shot in the arm to a moribund local environment, and create new economic opportunities that were not present before. And sometimes, it may do both, simultaneously. In either respect, chai qian is now an unaviodable reality that forms a major part of the contemporary urban Chinese experience. The net results, both on a large-scale societal level, and on a much smaller local/personal scale will be fascinating to observe.