Reading 24 Hours in Sim City an article on ChongQing (pronounced Chongching) by Asad Yawar (AlexYawar) on OhmyNews led me to watching Jonathan Watt’s short film Megalopolis, to which Yawar kindly put a link (available for free download from The Guardian - click here to view (mp4, 25.5MB)).

The background to the movie is this: Chongqing, a city in Western China that most people in the Western world have never heard of, is now the world’s biggest municipality, with over 31 million residents — more than the populations of Iraq, Peru, or Malaysia. The heart of the Chinese administration’s “Go West” policy to develop impoverished western China, Chongqing expands by 137,000 sq meters of new floor space every day. The city’s per capita income has shot up by 66 percent in the past five years to £731 (US$1,280) per year.

In my (relatively) clean office, surrounded by beautiful tall trees with yellow-green leaves, eating wasabi peas, I learned about the sad, disturbing urbanisation process of this gigantic city of China, where environmental and social problems have already outgrown the size of the city itself. Inter-mingled with the new fast-food generation and rich kids dancing to the likes of techno and french hiphop in this chaotic place are the bangbang men, or the door-to-door distributors. Most of these men came into the city from the countryside in the hope of making enough money to support their families and send their children to school. While they try to balance the weight of the goods hanging on the ends of their bamboo pole, often heavier than their own weight, their dreams seem to become heavier and heavier as the class divisions seem to grow wider every second. A table to rest your danced-up body at one of those flashy dance clubs would cost a month’s worth of an average bangbang man’s work. The young female police officers on rollerblades may be doing their best to clean up the city in different ways, but the social residues that are evident in every corner of the city appear to have become monuments never to fall down, or be taken down.

My good friend Lucy has once mentioned that having a fancy mobile phone in China is a big deal. People put in their utmost effort into acquiring the latest mobile phone represent the owner’s social status in China. Back in the old days, the Big Three Acquisitions, or da san jian, were a watch, a bicycle, and a sewing machine, which evolved to the “New Three Acquisitions” of a washing machine, a refrigerator, and a colour television. Now the “Super Three Acquisitions,” apparently, are a house, a private car, and a computer, which seem to be pretty much in line with the consumption aspirations of developed countries. As an outsider living in Australia, the image of the bang bang man seems very surreal. Illusionary.
It makes me wonder just how much longer their currently opaque existence can last before it becomes completely transparent in Chongqing, the West Pure(ly troubled) Land of China. And I wonder, in China so full of people, where are the people? Where is the mind?

I’m only starting now to learn more about China, but I highly doubt if I could ever find the answers to these questions.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 13th, 2006 at 1:58 pm and is filed under china. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.