Many Chinese cities are experiencing a construction boom, but I have been to few where, like Changzhou, I got the feeling that the city was not just being re-built, but that a completely new city was being built, largely over what was farm land until several years ago.
Even the city’s 5000 years of history is still being built, in the form of an‘old town’ in the suburbs. In several years, that old town will, no doubt, look like Nanjing’s Fuzimiao district. It will boast an atmosphere full of ‘dynamic fusions’ of ‘traditional pasts’ with the neon soaked smells of cooking sausages and dotted with special sights to photograph. Now, the scaffolding is only just off the old buildings that have colonized what was agricultural land on the city’s edge until several years ago. Among them are odd pieces that are genuinely old –three gates salvaged from urban re-construction elsewhere. Its location next to Yancheng Park, which contains an archeological site traceable to the Spring and Autumn Period, will also lend the newly constructed village some amount of credibility.
Changzhou has been highlighted twice by the CCTV news program ‘focus’ (jiaodian fangtan) for its failure to preserve any significant amount of its inner city heritage. I have heard people complain about this several times, and although Changzhou can hardly be unique in China in this respect, this failure is perhaps more galling due to the fame of heritage sites in nearby Suzhou, Nanjing and Zhenjiang. A resulting sense of embarrassment perhaps explains the zeal behind the city’s twin ‘heritage’ construction projects of the new Yancheng old town and also a gigantic, 200 million RMB tower to accompany the temple in the city’s centre. The latter was completed in time for the May holiday in 2007 and ludicrously promoted as ‘China’s Number One Buddhist Tower’ (中华第一大佛塔) (sometimes even ‘Asia’s Number One’). The tower does have a historical precedent, which was destroyed in the remote past. The vice-general manager of the company responsible for its construction explained in a press interview that the head monk and the city government decided to recreate the long vanished structure “in honour of the prosperity of our times, and transmit Buddhist culture” ( http://post.baidu.com/f?kz=154480361 )
Such extravagance almost inevitably leads to criticisms, such as one forum poster’s comment that Changzhou has consistently done worse than Suzhou or Wuxi. Allegedly, Changzhou’s development has been characterized by great attention paid to fantasies, like the ‘Number One Buddhist Tower’ and talk of a “super-city” future, while no attention is given to the city’s realities, such as the torn down old centre. “我们是“实事虚做，虚事实做。”这和前几年的创建特大型城市、如今的天宁开光，都是典型的“虚事实做”。近几年前后北岸等地，拆真文物选假文董，就是典型的“实事虚做” (Link to discussion of tower).
Yancheng is only about 15 minutes bike ride to there from where I live, in a University City –a city said to contain 100,000 students, which was also built only five years ago. That bike ride passes several large wastelands, the sites of a future hospital, future residential areas, parks and of course several future shopping malls. These building sites are flanked by walls coated in large billboards plastered with smiling model citizens, promising a happy, educated and wealthy future with enough space to gaze out on one’s own over parkland and fields of fruit trees. Many of the billboards seem calculated to appeal to women more than men, perhaps hinting at the increased role of women in middle-class family decision making. One, for example, shows a literally high-flying and unattached single woman poised wistfully above a sparkling metropolis.
While the slogans on the walls of the villages around Changzhou still exhort local families to follow the one-child future of the 1980s and 90s, those billboards advertise a new future of two child families for those middle class citizens who will inhabit the new housing.
I was once present during a conversation on this subject of university graduates and potential parents of two child families. Their general conclusion was that it would simply be too expensive to have two children: they were under no illusions that the utopia promised by billboards was likely to be cheap. A friend told me once that to get married in his hometown Jiangyin, near Changzhou, a middle-class man’s family would need at least 700,000 RMB: the costs of the wedding plus the costs of a down-payment on an apartment. A different friend once commented that, although gap between rich and poor is perhaps greater in Nanjing, Nanjing’s upper-class is less inclined to flaunt its wealth than Changzhou’s. “Here, they really like to show off… They want to let other people know that they are a boss, but you can understand why… here some of the people with money only have a high-school education, maybe only a primary school education, so it’s more important for them to show others that the own companies.” When I arrived here, a lot about Changhzou's wealthy seemed snobbish to me, and the advertising directed at them seemed like a naked appeal to this sobbishness. But I don't think it should be understood as the product of a particularly Chinese materialism. Rather it is almost the opposite. In a context in which a education (not wealth) is regarded as a primary marker of personal quality and prestige, the conspicuous consumption of the new Changzhou wealthy is the natural response of those without much education to those who would look at them as the peasants.
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