Behind the glass windowpanes of our clunky metal tour bus, the city rose above the horizon, blinking and bulging like a crop of radioactive vegetation. The flashy, non-linear building frames extended up from the earth like Las Vegas on steroids, bubbling over with toxic energy.
Shanghai was unlike any city I had ever seen.
And yet this is what I had expected from a country on the verge of an economic boom, caused by industrial obesity and innovation overload.
Since the late 1970s, when China first opened its economy to foreign markets, the country’s GDP has sky-rocketed more than tenfold, which last year made it the second-largest economy in the world, after the United States.
And as foreign investments continue to filter in, and the country prepares to step boldly onto the world stage for the 2008 Summer Olympic Games, China’s growth won’t be slowing any time soon.
But what I wasn’t expecting was the other side of the incline.
Though China boasts the second-largest economy in the world, over 130 million Chinese live below the poverty line. This is due in large part to the fact that a staggering 45 percent of the labor force is agrarian, when only 11.9 percent of the GDP actually comes from agriculture (and nearly half comes from industrial enterprises).
Despite its economic successes, China is fairly new to its industrialized persona. And as millions of people rocket into wealth, there are millions more who have been pushed back by the force of the blast.
On my way into Shanghai I stared at the lights of the city, skeptical of the excitement they seemed to imply. If my 10 previous days in China had given me anything, it was the ability to know that behind that glitzy facade was an old weary city, tucked away beneath the shadow of innovation.
Beijing
In all of China, there were three things that fearlessly stared me in the face—population, pollution and skyrises—and all three hit their heights in Beijing. As we feebly encroached the city walls, the order that our tour guide’s presence sent wafting through the bus vanished like a fleeting thought, powerless against the towering slabs of cracked concrete on the other side of the window.
Our bus was engulfed by a labyrinth of concrete, an ocean of people, and what I had assumed was morning haze: pollution.
Like Charles Dickens’ chimney-topped depiction of 19th-Century England and Upton Sinclair’s factory-laden picture of turn-of-the-century America, present-day China is overflowing with factories.
In Beijing, most of the city’s industry is nestled in the Chaoyang district, which covers an area the size of San Jose, but has twice the population. And similar to technologically business-savvy San Jose—the so-called capital of the Silicon Valley—the Chaoyang district includes two-thirds of Fortune’s Global Top 500 companies.
The district is a moneymaking machine, but the city is suffering big-time environmental failures.
Factories, as well as offices buildings, are major energy-burning enterprises. And in a country that primarily depends on coal to meet all of its energy quotas, the environment in Beijing is taking a major beating—especially now that Chaoyang is being prepped as the site for the 2008 Summer Olympic Games.
With massive funds acquired through private financial backers, the city is finishing up construction on 12 brand new sports facilities—including an 80,000-seat stadium—while refurbishing 11 pre-existing sites. This, on top of additional construction on seven new subway lines and 80 new subway stations, further reinforces the fact that the dust in Beijing is nowhere near settling.
Driving through the city was like driving through a gigantic grove of diseased stalks that disappeared into the city’s thick haze.
My eyes were plastered to the window, bombarded by this city of over 17-million people, larger than the four most populous U.S. cities combined.
Without enough pavement to satiate the swollen crowd, the population filled every car on the road, spilled over into speeding busses packed to the brim, topped-off clusters of rolling bicycles, and—with all other options exhausted—hit the ground running on blocks of street-hugging footpaths.
As soon as we pulled over, about a dozen street vendors were selling “Beijing 2008” Olympic hats, Chairman Mao-faced pocket watches and other factory-made trinkets that danced enticingly at the foot of our bus.
I might have walked away with Mao in my pocket had my attention not been whipped away by the scene: the sky was filled with air molecules, loaded with dirt and debris, and strung like pearls into curtains of filth that hung in between the buildings.
In this environment we visited historic sites, like Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City, the Summer Palace and thousand-year-old cultural relic the Great Wall; but our views were shrouded in smog, and our photographs blurry from dirt.
I waited four days for the sun to come up over Beijing, but it never did.
This wasn’t unusual.
Our tour guide, Ming, told us about a class of kindergartners in Beijing who were drawing pictures of the cityscape, and when their teacher explained to them that the skies they were drawing should be colored blue, the children protested, insisting that the sky was gray.
In their first five years, these children couldn’t remember looking up and seeing a blue sky.
The city is working hard to tame pollution, and expects to have clear skies before the Olympic Games. About 200 factories will be relocated, cars will run on restricted schedules (a process that has already been tested, to less than promising results) and city officials predict that summer storms will clear the air—even if they will have to shoot thousands of silver iodate pellets into the sky to induce the rain clouds themselves.
Out of so much economic growth has come so much destruction.
Three Gorges Dam
No other city in China hit me quite like Beijing. But the Yangtze River threw me for a loop, and it began in the Xilingxia Gorge.
The high-rises disappeared, the curtains of filthy molecules lifted and not a single person lined the riverbank. The Three Gorges of the Yangtze River, though brown and hazy, were comparable to the untamed beauty of Yosemite, in relation to the harrowing pollution in Beijing.
But we were not there to visit riverbanks, we were there to see the Three Gorges River Dam, the new frontier in Chinese innovation.
In 1997, China set to work building the Dam, the benefits of which are unparalleled on a national scale: the dam is to regulate flooding for farmers along the Yangtze River during the rainy season, which would save millions of dollars in spoiled crops and millions of the lives that are threatened each year by rapidly rising waters. The dam would also provide power for a significant portion of the population, thereby reducing the country’s coal consumption by roughly 31-million tons per year, and cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 100-million tons.
With such beneficial consequences, it’s hard to imagine such a project would be contested.
But construction on the dam has already required flooding miles of land along the river, displacing 1.5 million people. This has caused an uproar for those whose homes, heritages and economic gain all depend on the banks of the Yangtze.
The government has offered either a sum of money or new housing along higher ground for those whose homes have now washed away. But this is little compensation for people forced to leave the only way of life they’ve ever known.
In addition, thousands of years of unearthed history has drowned along with these homes and farms, never to be discovered without the possibly detrimental effects of water damage.
With this in mind, I expected to float along the river, drifting past dilapidated homes, abandoned buildings and the drenched crusts of once-fertile farmland. But this apocalyptic vision never materialized. The land along the Yangtze was rather peaceful, and empty.
I felt very out of place, sitting inside of my floating hotel, with its disco room and all-you-can-eat buffet. The boat stood out, like an electrified bubble, extracted from the modern world and injected onto the Yangtze, bobbing through its ancient lands, impervious to its history.
The desolate landscape stretched on for some time, until—up ahead in the distance—I saw a booming metropolis perched on the bank of the river, as subtle as a mirage. And when we got close, other misfit cities seemed to sprout up next to it, like weeds.
These buildings—there were 13 towns in total—were those built by the government for the people who had lost their homes to the rising waters. But the enormity of these mini-cities was so out of character with the serenity of the river.
We floated by, with split-second impressions of the shores, as our vessel electrified each dingy ripple it sliced through.
I thought of Beijing, with its insufferable air quality and impassible city streets, and I shuddered to think what these riverbanks would look like in a few years, when the dam is finally complete and the growing population in Beijing has spilled over into this river.
Shen Nong Stream
Days later, we went on our first, and only, non-industrial excursion of the whole trip, which, to me, meant that we were in for something authentic.
We traveled for 30 minutes, without a metropolis in sight, until we reached a row of little wooden peapod boats. They were tied to a steep panel of staircases that led up to a row of souvenir huts.
This is where we met the trackers.
Theirs is a story of mountainous terrain, precious cargo, and shallow waters. For hundreds of years, the farmers living among the steep slopes of the Shen Nong Stream battled nature every time they left the farm to trade supplies. But without roads to drive on or high waters through which to sail, they traveled the river basin, through streams, over rocks and beside overreaching bushes, with piles of their heavy cargo resting in their homemade, wooden boats.
The trackers moved deftly through the rocks, pushing their boats with thin, wooden oars. And when the waters ran dry, they got out and pulled—ropes hugging their torsos, and attached to the boats, they walked along the banks of the river, dragging the heavy stack of goods that weighed down their boat.
It was a dangerous job, but they kept packing their boats and dragging them up the river, because it had become their way of life. Now they’re packing their boats with tourists and dragging us up the river, which I guess you could say because it’s their new way of life.
We sat in the peapods, 12 Americans lathered in sunscreen, hidden beneath puffy orange life jackets, digital camera lenses and sunglasses that protected our eyes from UV rays—a huge contrast to the trackers, who traditionally made these journeys without so much as clothing for protection. The national board of tourism has since intervened, however, and they now wear short shorts and t-shirts.
The trackers lined the edge of our boat with their flimsy oars, and then we went—a cacophony of splashing water and snapping cameras.
When we got to the shallow spell, our rowers carefully stepped out onto the rocky, river bottom, and with the ropes tied around their waists, pulled our boat through the rocky terrain.
My eyes traveled the length of the rope, and on their way back they followed the white line to an outstretched hand holding a packet of postcards.
The hand belonged to a shirtless and somewhat toothless old man with a satchel of postcard packets over his shoulder. Wading vulnerably in the stream just 10 feet away from us as the rushing water smashed against his body, he smiled a toothless grin as he stretched out his arm.
After five in our tour group bought postcards from the wobbling man—impressed by his dedication to the trade—our peapods turned around and drifted downstream, leaving the man with his postcards, his dollar bills and a big smile stretched across his face.
Seeing the vendor wading in the current made me think about what would happen to him in the future: with the river flooding, he’s going to lose his job. And the trackers will lose their jobs just like so many others had lost theirs.
The Three Gorges Dam Project has already displaced 1.5 million people and the government is expecting to displace 2 million more.
Our river guide told us that her grandmother lived on a small island in the Yangtze, where she farmed tealeaves. Her livelihood existed on that land. When the government gave her the option of housing or cash, she chose the money and went to live with her son: with no marketable skills, she was too old to begin anew.
What’s going to happen to the trackers when the area is flooded? What’s going to happen to the man who already trudges upstream to make a buck?
In the midst of so much gain, the Three Gorges Dam is instilling a tidal wave of loss.
Shanghai
This brings us to Shanghai, the heart and soul of China’s economic ties to the world.
I drove into the city staring skeptically at its flashy, Vegas-like skyline. I had been through China’s highs and lows, seen urban cities and rural streams, and now I was ready—for once—to venture out on my own, and take whatever the city had to offer.
Away from metal tour buses, electric yachts and peapod boats, I nudged my way into the little crannies of the city, so close to the neighborhoods and avenues my tour bus had grazed over so many times. The rush and clamor around me was captivating and held my attention with a firm grip.
Dodging rickshaws and catcalls, my adrenaline pumped with the beat of the restless city.
Soon I was one in a pool of people rushing to get past one another. I was forced to concentrate on a number of things at once: the squeaky rickshaw that wouldn’t slow down; the vendor dragging her feet next to me, slumped over with two large baskets of lychee nuts over her shoulders; the little kid kicking up dust in front of me while riding an old, rusty tricycle; the whistling that filtered out from the fruit stand to my right; and all the incessant stares coming at me from the flood of people I was walking amongst.
But then I was stopped by a familiar face. It was my tour guide, Ming. She was making her way toward me from the other direction.
We stopped and exchanged a few words, then continued down our paths, I back to the hotel, she to use the Internet.
Only in stopping did I realize that the smog, the buildings, everything that had bothered me so much just days before, had slipped my consciousness, only to be replaced by the mantra: “don’t get hit.” But those elements hadn’t disappeared; when I stopped to look up, and when I looked out onto the stretch of soiled road ahead, there they were.
The moment struck me, and I didn’t quite know why.
I looked out over the city from my hotel room on the 31st floor, and all I could see were the whimsical towers that corporate America had placed in this city. From up here, I couldn’t even see that little market place I had swum my way through just moments before. I looked down and tried to imagine where Ming was that very moment, but the city was so far away, and the landscape so massive that I didn’t know where to begin.
Ming was lost within a sea of people, under a blanket of smog, among buildings so tall and dense they hid the ground below.
I realized that this is the danger of China’s growth: that cities will rise and grow so strong and so fast that they’ll swallow anyone without the means to keep up. The vendors, the farmers, the trackers and the millions of men who trudge upstream just to make a buck—when the waters and the buildings begin to rise-up, these people will drown, unless someone comes in to help them swim.
