My apologies for being offline the the past three weeks, but I was back in the States for Chinese New Year to see family and friends, as well as take care of some work over there and just returned to Asia this past Monday where I’ve been busy working and setting up my new home in Hong Kong.  So it’s fitting that I am sitting at my beloved Starbucks in the Garden City Mall in Shenzhen about an hour or so before I am due to move out of my room here and bring all of my worldly possessions to Hong Kong, meaning all four suitcases-worth.

Heading home for any extended period of time and then returning to China means that I have some room to process all that’s happened during the time I’ve been here, as well as answer questions from family and friends about what they might have seen or heard about China in the news.  The two topics dominating any conversations I had about China were either the stock market and economy or the continued crackdown on political and civil liberties, including the ongoing case of the missing Hong Kong booksellers.

Having some space from China, I still feel that this is a country heading in the wrong direction at the moment.  It’s not that it can’t or won’t turn itself around, but almost daily there is another news headline that makes me shake my head and wonder what’s really going on here.  The latest was President Xi’s visit to the country’s major news and media organizations in China explicitly telling them to act as a mouthpiece for the party.  This new policy is another attempt to exert greater control over another aspect of Chinese society that has the potential to create social instability.  However, like many previous moves, this one smacks of insecurity and coming at a time when there are questions around China’s ability to manage its economy, it’s clear this is another attempt to mask potential problems that may exist in the system.  If these problems somehow were brought to light, there is a real fear that people would not be happy and social unrest could erupt.  Definitely not a move of a leader in control of his country.

Beyond that, I have been thinking more about Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and other cities that see themselves as other in the context of Greater China.  Hong Kong is probably the most salient example of this trend in light of protests over the years against certain actions taken or policies put forth by the mainland.  The largest of recent memory being the Umbrella Revolution in the fall of 2014 triggered by Beijing shifting the goalposts on universal suffrage for Hong Kong’s Chief Executive.  The alleged kidnapping of the booksellers has only added accelerated this feeling of “other-ness” that seems to run deep among Hong Kongers.  However, more interesting and something that only really hit me this morning as I was being driven around Shenzhen in an area known as the Hi-Tech Park where some of Chinas biggest tech companies have their offices including Tencent, ZTE, and DJI. I saw all these twenty-something tech workers running to work and the scene could have just as easily been one from Silicon Valley.  Shenzhen is a city trying to build its future on technology and finance as it firmly sheds its industrial past.  More interesting is the fact that very few people in Shenzhen are actually from Shenzhen, so the city does not have to hew closely to a long-established culture.  Many people (mainly foreigners visiting or living here, including myself at times) bemoan the lack of a deep-rooted culture.  But my riding partner that morning who has lived here for quite some time even though she is not from here framed this lack of a deep-rooted culture in a positive way that I had not considered before.  She claimed that this lack of culture meant that the city was building something new from the ground up, which made Shenzhen much more open than any other Chinese city that is hemmed in by its past.  You can see it in all the new skyscrapers, shiny shopping malls, and tech companies pushing the Chinese innovation storyline.  But I had not thought about it in terms of what it means for a city and its outlook, as well as its place in the national narrative.  The conversation was sparked by my question about whether Shenzhen was different than other parts of China and upon receiving an emphatic “yes”, I followed up and was presented with this theory.  If Shenzhen can perhaps be added to the “other” category because of its short history, lack of a strong local culture, and welcoming people from all over China with easy access to Hong Kong, I wonder what this means for the future of the city and more importantly, China as perhaps other cities begin to see themselves as different than the rest of the country, which would be a rather backhanded way of unravelling the social cohesion that President Xi working so hard to maintain.  Something to be explored further in another post, but wanted to get it out there because it’s something I feel like I am going to be thinking about for quite some time.  But now I must finish packing and make my way back to Hong Kong.


Divorced from Reality

January 17, 2016







A Monkey at McDonald’s

January 16, 2016

Happy New Year, albeit a bit late.  I must apologize for not writing the past two weeks, but my boss has been in town from the States and only left the other day.  While there were many things I have wanted to write about, it’s been a whirlwind with her here and there have been very few moments where I could sit down and write.  With her departure, things should return to normal and the pace of writing will pick up.  Just when I thought I couldn’t be surprised, as I was out getting my coffee at the local Starbucks and some milk and apples to throw into a giant bowl of granola and yogurt, I saw a man with his monkey outside of McDonald’s.

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Outside the McDonald’s by my apartment a man with his monkey


Yup, it was a monkey


More to come tomorrow.  I promise.

Another Day, Another Mall

December 27, 2015

I don’t want anyone to come away from my blog thinking all I do in China is walk around malls and sit in Starbucks drinking coffee, but if I didn’t spend any time doing this, I’d be missing out on a big part of what’s making modern China tick.  These luxury malls and the shoppers who frequent stores purveying these premium brands (yes, Starbucks is a premium brand here when the average drink costs RMB30 or a bit less than US$5) are the future of this country, especially when the leadership is hellbent on reorienting the economy away from manufacturing and infrastructure investment towards domestic consumption.  It’s places like the IFS and today’s mall, Taikoo Li (太古里), that represent the way going forward if China is to ever make that transition.

So yes, I am sitting here at a Starbucks in Taikoo Li, which was built by the Hong Kong developer, Swire Properties.  A good friend of mine in Hong Kong who lives in Taikoo Shing, a family-oriented neighborhood on Hong Kong Island, told me that anything with the Swire name is going to be a quality property and this mall is no exception.  Built around an ancient temple, Daci Temple,  where you can still partake in a traditional tea ceremony, Daci Temple (大慈寺), Taikoo Li is filled with your usual luxury shops including Gucci, Burberry, Max Mara, and Cartier, as well as the Chengdu flagship stores for Apple (which with its two stores in Chengdu has more here than in Shenzhen) and Muji and the first stores in China for brands like Victoria’s Secret and Hollister.  It’s quite the complex laid out as if it was a warren of traditional Chengdu alleys, similar to Xintiandi in Shanghai or even Sanlitun in Beijing, which is another Swire property.  And the place is hopping with people eating, drinking, taking pictures, and even doing some shopping.

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One of the main squares in Taikoo Li

The Christmas decorations are still out in full force and effect, but so are the after Christmas sales with some stores offering discounts up to 40 or 50% off.

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Entrance to Taikoo Li as coming from Chunxi Lu (春熙路) Metro stop

I blogged recently about the “real” China and malls like this one are the new “real” China.  What’s neat about Chengdu is that you can walk from your hotel to the Metro station in Tianfu Square and pass by little hole-in-the-wall or “fly” restaurants （苍蝇馆), wet markets, and people playing mahjong in the streets, so not all of the old “real” China is lost.  It’s perhaps this blending of old and new that Chengdu seems to still do so well, whereas a city like Shenzhen which did not exist 40 years ago is all new and will continue to be that way going forward.  I don’t know if Chengdu will be able to survive the onslaught of modernization and the power of the new “real” China, but at the moment it seems to have found some sort of equilibrium, however tenuous.

Having now been here for a few days, I still really like the city.  It’s hard for me to put my finger on it exactly, but this trip is my first time to the interior of China.  When you think of Chengdu, and Sichuan province in general, it’s the last extremely developed area of the country before heading off into the wilds of western Sichuan and Tibet.  Chengdu feels less like a frontier city and more like an experiment in modernizing the interior.  It’s no secret that the government has spent considerable time and money spreading growth from the eastern coast to the interior and Chengdu is something of a showcase city, much like Shenzhen was when it became China’s first Special Economic Zone.  Chengdu has not received so formal a designation, but walking around the city and taking it all in, it’s hard not to feel that there is something special about this place and it’s not just all the panda advertising.

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Panda ad outside of my hotel

Nor is it all of the amazingly spicy food that I have been eating, which I will write about another time.  Perhaps it’s what China could be, though without the pollution that has rendered today a rather smoggy day (though nothing like Beijing) or the fact that signs are still posted on the street reminding people not to smoke on buses and in the subway reminding parents not to let their kids go to the bathroom on the train. Chengdu, like most of China, is moving quickly to catch up to the rest of the world in terms of development, but it feels a little more comfortable taking it’s time doing so and making sure it’s being done the “Chengdu way”.

Of course I wonder how many Gucci or Louis Vuitton stores a city really needs and who actually fills all of these new office towers going up, including the top floors of the Evergrande Huazhi Office Tower, which sit there all lit up and empty at night.

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The vacant and well-lit floors of the Evergrande Tower on the left

Those are questions for another day, but one that China unfortunately will have to reckon with as it continues working through it’s breakneck growth and reorientation to a consumption-driven economy.  These malls and buildings are part of the infrastructure and property investment that has driven growth in many cities around the country and if towers like Evergrande remain empty, one has to wonder what the means for future development and growth in these cities.

On that note, I leave you to get back to the hotel and get ready for a night of sampling Chengdu’s many street snacks.

Zombies at Christmas

December 6, 2015

I am having one of those weekends where I am frustrated with China and it’s many contradictions.  As long as I have lived in and studied the country, it still does not make sense to.  I know that’s the reason it’s held my interest for nearly twenty years, but sometimes I reach a breaking point and then it passes.  Between having to deal with spotty phone connections, wrestling with my VPN so that I can communicate with the outside world, and the inability or express frustration in Chinese because my teachers only taught me happy words, at about the month point I am frustrated.

On Friday I went up to Guangzhou for work. It was my first time back in over five years and while I was only there for a few hours and pretty much toured a school and sat in the train station, I had a two-hour drive up from Shenzhen to think about China and my time here so far.  The drive was up the 广深沿江高速, which literally translates to the Guangzhou-Shenzhen Along the River Expressway.  It runs up from Guangzhou through all of the factory towns of the Pearl River Delta, including Dongguan, through to Guangzhou.  Those factory towns are the ones that you read about in the newspaper closing up shop and moving to Vietnam, Bangladesh, the Philippines, other ASEAN countries, or inland China where labor is less expensive.  These factories are the ones that churned out jeans, iPhones, bras, shirts, printers, and many other goods over the years.  Now driving up the highway, many are either abandoned or look like they’re about to be abandoned.  But to counter those abandoned factories I saw lots of cranes putting up apartment blocks.

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View from the car headed towards Guangzhou

The thought that’s always front and center when I see these new apartments is “Who is going to live here?”, which from the number of so-called ghost cities in China is a plausible question.  However, this is the Pearl River Delta and if there is one trend I have noticed over the last 15 years it’s that there is a strong push to urbanize the entire corridor from Shenzhen to Guangzhou.  So there is little doubt in my mind that these towers will be filled and one day between the two cities there will be an unbreakable stretch of these towers.  So what happens to the abandoned factories?  Assuming there are no toxic chemicals on those sites, which is a big if, then towers will go up.  I’m not sure if China has the equivalent of Superfund sites like we do in the States, and if they did, I am not sure there would be enough political will to designate them as such.  It’s the unknowing or inability to know, assuming one wanted to know that drives me nuts about China sometimes.

It’s the holiday season, even here in China.


Christmas tree at entrance to my apartment complex

Between the random Christmas trees and holiday music blasting in the shopping centers, including the ubiquitous “All I Want for Christmas” by Mariah Carey, it adds a surreal dimension to life in China.


Holiday festivities at the Garden City Mall

Maybe its my frustration speaking, but there is something zombie-like about taking in this whole China experience as a foreigner.  I already disconnected because of certain personal uncertainties, but Shenzhen is a city built on commerce.  In fact, it’s really the reason it was ever conceived by the central government 30 some-odd years ago.  People mill about in a frenzy of eating and shopping, though I see very few shopping bags, which might lend some anecdotal credence to the stories you read of China’s economy slowing down.  It’s kind of like what it was like going to a mall during the last recession in the States.  People were there, but they weren’t spending.  The malls are more like entertainment zones with hockey rinks, playgrounds, movies, and restaurants.

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A hockey game at Coastal City Mall

Some days it feels like all people do here is eat and shop.  There is no real pervasiveness of the news like back home where big cities have tickers on buildings with the latest stories or elevators at work have the little screens with the day’s top news stories.  No tickers in China and the elevator at my school has pictures of pandas and penguins to go along with the date and time.  It’s a bit of an over-generalization to say that no Chinese people care about current events, but the government has put in place a number of distractions to ensure that people pay as little attention as possible to the world outside, unless it’s necessary to stoke nationalist sentiment as a bulwark for the government.  Of course there are intellectuals and people concerned with these sorts of matters, but they are on the fringes of society.  There are no cable news programs outside of CCTV and other government-run outlets, so there’s no real widespread forum from which people can get alternative opinions.  For better or worse, Donald Trump and his rallies get air time on television and we have a relatively robust network of columnists and commentators trying to make sense of things in our country.

This past Friday, China celebrated its second National Constitutional Day, commemorating its constitution that is supposed to provide for all kinds of freedoms that exist only on paper.  There were no noticeable celebrations here in Shenzhen.  In fact, it seems like the way the government decided to commemorate it was to continue snuffing out various forms of expression, ironically the same kinds guaranteed in the constitution.  Included in that snuffing out was a recently published book by a Tsinghua University (referred by some as the MIT of China for its science and engineering prowess) historian about China’s constitutional transformation.

I guess my frustrations this weekend started small, but have now led me down this path of wondering what is really going on in this country.  It’s hard to tell what lurks beneath the veneer of iPhones (and may iPhone wannabes), fancy shopping malls, and the smiling faces roaming about these shopping malls.  I guess only time will tell.

The Real China?

December 1, 2015

“Where is the real China?”












Home Sweet Hong Kong

November 21, 2015

I’ve been back in Asia over a week at this point and made my first trip to Hong Kong yesterday for meetings.  I’m staying the weekend because my brother and his wife are swinging through at the tail-end of the honeymoon in SE Asia and I am really excited to show them around this city that was my first home after college.

Coming back to Hong Kong is always filled with a mix of nostalgia and awe at both how quickly the city changes and also how so many random points in the city remind me of when I lived here over 13 years ago.  I took the ferry to Hong Kong for the first time from Shenzhen and aside from having to arrive nearly an hour before the ferry and queue up for immigration in Hong Kong, it was a rather easy trip.  It’s just good to be back here.  From the moment I stepped out of immigration at the ferry terminal into, what else, a massive shopping mall, I felt instantly more present.  Now I love China and spending time there is intellectually and (usually) professionally fulfilling, but the personal angle is so much harder to actualize there.  When I was living in Guangzhou for the year, I was very obviously a foreigner and nothing else about my identity mattered to people there.  Now we have an international school in Shenzhen filled with American teachers, which is a pretty cool thing to experience, but it feels like an island of recognition in the midst of the otherness that one usually feels in China.  As a result of feeling this otherness, isolation tends to be the norm in China because no matter how good your Mandarin is or as much as you want to blend in, you can’t.  So coming to Hong Kong, it’s refreshing to just walk the streets and ride the subway and feel a part of something that is more multicultural.

I taught a unit on multiculturalism to my students at Sun Yat-sen University (中大) and when I asked them to list concepts that would be a part of a multicultural society, they were stumped.  It wasn’t until I began writing things on the board that they understood where I was going with the exercise.  I think the difficulty stemmed from this idea that most of China is made up of Han Chinese and anyone else is seen as an other.  That only accounts for the ethnic dimension of multiculturalism, though.  Things like sexual orientation, gender, sex, religion, and a whole host of other things that make up a more multicultural society don’t exist in China.  Now I am being facetious, but while all of these things exist in Chinese society, people don’t tend to see their society as such.  I feel like there is a more simplistic view of society which makes it harder for difference to flourish.

Then you come to a place like Hong Kong, which while not perfect, compared to the mainland is a more open society.  What’s most jarring is that when I am sitting in Shenzhen, I am 15-20 miles from the central business district in Hong Kong, but it might as well be a world apart.  I struggle with how to explain the difference between the two societies, but a few things stand out including Hong Kong’s history as both a British colony and treaty port.  The British legacy lives on, but it’s been joined with other cultures brought by waves of expats who come and go over the years.  At the moment, I have noticed a significant number of French expats milling around, which could have something to do with France’s lackluster economy.  However, it’s not just the expats, but a local population that has always looked outward for its livelihood.  It’s this orientation that makes the city quicker to embrace global trends and more comfortable for people to fit in and go about their business.  There are definitely parts of Hong Kong way out in the New Territories where villages exist much as they did 50 years ago, but even those pockets are changing.

So I am here for the weekend and soon will be moving down here, but it’s the contrast between Shenzhen and Hong Kong, two cities that are so close, that I am wrestling with.  The Shekou district of Shenzhen, where I am staying feels like Hong Kong lite with its shopping malls and new apartment towers.  They even have a part of town on the water called Sea World that is filled with Western restaurants and the most expats I’ve seen so far in Shenzhen.IMG_9392

The picture above is the part of Sea World along the water, but it’s best to think of it like a large town square with restaurants and cafes off to the sides and more restaurants scattered off the main square.  I feel like Sea World could be anywhere, but it’s in China, a country in which I still can’t access Facebook and any apps that rely on it like Words With Friends or the New York Times without a VPN.  Shenzhen is so close to Hong Kong, but brings back none of the multiculturalism that exists there.  Hong Kong seems to only serve as a giant shopping mall for mainlanders crossing the border to visit with little interest in anything else going on there.  Even the metro, which is very similar to the MTR is almost, but not quite right.


So close . . .

I’ll be in Hong Kong for the next few days, so expect a few more posts from here and then it’s back to Shenzhen for Thanksgiving.