Together with photographer Ruben Lundgren, we worked on the selection of photoseries for the book…a great process in which one has to make decisions….!

Given China’s fast economic development and pace of urbanization, houses built between 1979 and 1999 cannot meet the demands of modern living, either because of limited space or a lack of supporting facilities,” he said. “Only those homes built after 1999 are likely to be preserved in the longer term.”

China’s fast housing production during the 80’s and 90’s has led to substandard compounds, similar to Europe’s post-war residential area’s that were demolished on a big scale during recent years. But the size of the Chinese problem seems to be a lot bigger.

In April, Qiu Baoxing, vice-minister of the ministry, said during an industry forum that Chinese buildings can only stand for between 25 and 30 years. In contrast, the average life expectancy of a building in Britain is 132 years and they last around 74 years in the United States.

Read the full article ‘Most homes’ to be demolished in 20 years.

This weekend, Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad published an interview with Daan about Go West.

The interview explains the origin and content of the Go West Project and tells background stories about the taxi project Go West organized for the Shenzhen Biennale. Moreover Daan is asked to do suggestions how one can prepare for a trip to China. Here’s a wrap up - and some additional books and websites:

Internet:

Chinasmack, Danwei, ChinaDigitalTimes (translated Chinese blogs) - FYI: these are not available in China…

More: Six (great blog on the life of Chinese students in Beijing), Patrick Chovanec (great economic insights on China) Movingcities (about urbanism in changing conditions)

Books:

Inside the Red Mansion, Postcards from Tomorrow Square, Factorygirls.

More: What does China Think, Bad Elements.

On Architecture / Urbanism: The Chinese Dream, The Great Leap Forward.

Do you want to know more about our work, or do you have questions, suggestions or other ideas, please mail: info[at]gowestproject.com

If you want to stay updated, please subscribe to our RSS feed, join our LinkedIn group or sign up for our monthly newsletter!

Download the full article here. (in Dutch)

China, which long seemed immune to the global crunch, now faces the threat of a homemade real estate crisis. This could spell trouble for many local governments, which in some cases have financed almost a third of their major infrastructure projects, like airports and train stations, by selling agricultural land to real estate sharks.

The article quotes Cao Jinhai from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, who scetches the worst case scenario, when local governments run out of money, because they lose their single most important source of income: land sales.

In the worst case, Cao predicts, there could be a large-scale run on the banks. “Of the 4 trillion yuan in the Chinese economic stimulus package, 3 trillion are in fact coming from local governments — and they borrowed the money from the banks.”

The Go West Project plans to focus on the overproduction of real estate in China during our trip to Yinchuan in October this year.

Police chiefs in the mainland city of Chongqing have ordered officers to eat western instead of Chinese food in a bid to change the culture of the force. They believe that the initiative will help an ongoing drive to wipe out endemic corruption in the force. The city’s former chief of police was recently executed for his close links to organised crime gangs.

Increasing influence of SOE’s on Chinese real estate market (source: New York Times)

Earlier this year, we posted an article by the Global Times reported the measures the Chinese government took on the increasing influence of State Owned Enterprises (SOE’s) on the real estate market. Today, the New York Times has a front page article on the growing influence of these SOE’s. The article is chrystal clear about the negative effects the SOE’s have on the real estate market:

By driving up property prices, the state-owned companies, which are ultimately controlled by the national government, are working at cross-purposes with the central government’s effort to keep China’s real estate boom from becoming a debt-driven speculative bubble

Figures proof a potential bubble, about which we reported earlier:

A recent study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Mass., found that land prices in Beijing had jumped by about 750 percent since 2003, and that half of that gain came in the last two years. Housing prices have also skyrocketed, doubling in many cities over the last few years.

Read the full article here.

1. Not all buildings are finished

2. Disc shaped buildings on top of other ones

3. The city combines flyovers, skyscrapers and neon in an unpolished way

4. Double elevated highways constructed over buildings

5. Mountains with Swiss villas

6. Super elevated highways!

7. That in some views, without too much effort, it is possible to see only concrete, and a pool

8. …or only concrete..

9. ..and more …

10. ..and even more..

11. That the bridge over the Jianling river seems tiny but is in fact huge.

Today we were back in the city we liked from the very moment we saw her…take a look…need we say more..?

from 2005 to 2025, India will need to add 700 million to 900 million square meters of floor space a year; in China, the required numbers could be 1,600 million to 1,900 million square meters.

..and..

During the same period, India will need to add at least 350 to 400 kilometers of metropolitan railways and subways annually, while the corresponding number in China will be closer to 1,000 kilometers.

..moreover..

While India spends $17 per capita on capital investments in urban infrastructure annually, China spends $116.

But there is also more qualitative analysis:

While India has barely paid attention to its urban transformation, China has developed a set of internally consistent practices across every element of the urbanization operating model: funding, governance, planning, sectoral policies, and the shape, or pattern, of urbanization, both across the nation as a whole and within cities themselves.

Read the whole article here: Comparing urbanization in China and India - McKinsey Quarterly - Economic Studies - Country Reports.

AP reports about villages of migrant workers in Beijing being closed off during nighttime. The reason for this radical move? Crime:

It’s Beijing’s latest effort to reduce rising crime often blamed on the millions of rural Chinese migrating to cities for work. The capital’s Communist Party secretary wants the approach promoted citywide. But some state media and experts say the move not only looks bad but imposes another layer of control on the already stigmatized, vulnerable migrants.

Urban villages are rural communities, incorporated by cities. You can find them all over China: former farmers reacted pragmatic to the expanding city by constructing cheap housing for migrants. The Chinese government is not very fond of the villages, and wants to break them down - because they don’t fit in the image of a modern city.

Closing them off is a reflex with a historic meaning:

Gating has been an easy and effective way to control population throughout Chinese history, said Huang, the geography professor. In past centuries, some walled cities would impose curfews and close their gates overnight. In the first decades of communist rule, the desire for top-down organization and control showed in work-unit compounds, usually guarded and enclosed.

However, there is a difference:

“To put it crudely, gated communities in the city are a way for the upper middle-class and urban rich to keep out trespassers, whereas gated villages represent a way for the state to ‘keep in’ or contain the problem of ‘migrant workers’ who live in these villages,” Pow Choon-Pieu, an assistant professor of geography at the National University of Singapore who has studied the issue, said in an e-mail.

Read the whole story here: Beijing starts gating, locking migrant villages - Yahoo News.

At a conference this week, Chinese officials called the investment in western China a strategic move, designed to raise the living standards of the region’s people and shift growth away from China’s prosperous coastal areas.

The areas include Northwest China’s Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, North China’s Inner Mongolia autonomous region, Southwest China’s Tibet autonomous region, and Sichuan and Yunnan provinces.

via Spending for Stability in China’s Far West - NYTimes.com.

And not only the government is moving westwards. Also electronics manufacturer Foxconn - moves westwards, to Zhengzhou that is:

Foxconn and senior officials of Zhenzhou and Henan are working on the details of an agreement to build the plant, said a spokesman for the municipal government.

The first phase of the plant will measure 133 (!!) hectares.

The new plant is to employ 300,000 people in the long run. About 100,000 people are to be recruited in the near future, said a recruitment advertisement on the official website of Henan’s Hebi city.

Some quotes from Huangs comment on China’s labor situation:

The labor income share of Chinese G.D.P. declined from 57 percent in 1983 to only 37 percent in 2005. (…) This is to say that hundreds of millions of Chinese workers have lost relative to government and corporations, which, in terms of head counts, represent a tiny fraction of China’s massive population.

Some have argued that the U.S. firms need not worry because the labor component of their production costs is small. This is simply not true. U.S. firms themselves may not have a high labor component in their cost structure but their suppliers — and their suppliers — do. American firms, which sit at the top of the food chain, depend heavily on the labor-intensive operations down below.

Another specialist writing on the NYT forum is Leslie Chang, author of the famous book ‘Factory Girls‘, about workers in a factory in Donguan, Guangdong province. Some of her comments:

The new generation came of age when migration was already an accepted path to a better life. Younger and better educated than their predecessors, they are motivated less by the poverty of the countryside than by the opportunity of the city.

Although this generation of migrants is more demanding, that does not necessarily translate into more organized protests. Chinese workers are above all pragmatic, and the prospect of joining a large-scale demonstration seems risky and futile to most.

The universe of the factory can be a complicated place. Young people living away from home for the first time are learning to deal with co-workers, roommates, and bosses. They are adjusting to a world of material and sexual freedom, fleeting relationships and crushing loneliness. They face demands from families back home who often have little understanding of their new lives. These factors create a stressful environment from which, for a handful of workers, suicide seems the only escape. To boil this desperate act down to a protest against working conditions is to deny a worker’s complexity and humanity.

Read the whole forum here.

are going to return these social functions to the government”.

Obviously, this is a big step in the way Taiwan and Hong Kong manufacturers are doing business in China - and it will have major impact on the physical city as well. Read the whole story here.