A country so vast,
A single template prevails:
It all looks the same.
I find this one of the most depressing things about modern China, the staggering homogeneity of its large cities. This week I'm in Kunming, down in the south-west, near the Thai border. Yes, it's at the opposite end of the country from Beijing, some 1,200 miles distant. And the climate is much nicer. But in so many ways, it feels exactly the same: the same bland, cheap architecture, the exact same building materials everywhere; and, these days, the same crazy traffic congestion, the same choking pollution, too; the same unplanned, unfettered industrialization - you see it everywhere in China. Only 6 or 7 years ago, my friends used to tell me that Kunming was a great escape from the drudgery of the capital, that it was still largely undeveloped, unspoiled. Well, that changed very quickly.
It's not just the urban blight, the reckless despoliation of the natural environment that is so disheartening; it's the relentless homogeneity of everything. There are some variations in the older traditional architecture (wherever any of this has been able to survive). There are variations in the climate and flora, of course. And, most intriguingly, I find, there are substantial variations in local brands and chain stores (few if any companies have yet managed to establish a dominating nationwide presence). But apart from that, most large towns and cities in China are almost indistinguishable from one another: they've all sprung up from virtually nothing in the last 20 years or so, they've all been turned out by the same to-get-rich-is-glorious cookie-cutter. If someone kidnapped, drugged, and blindfolded you, and threw you out of the back of a van in the middle of an unknown Chinese city - you'd have a hell of a time working out where you were.
Kunming 10 years ago was a fairly sleepy, unindustrialized little backwater of old China. Now, it's pretty nearly as much of a characterless shithole as any other city of 8 million people. Sigh.
I'm hoping to get away to Dali for a few days next week - which is horribly touristy now, but still reasonably laidback and 'old world'. Hoping....
Well, the Dali trip misfired. However, I have to offer an apology to Kunming; I had a much better time there than I had on two previous trips, three or four years ago. I suppose on those occasions I was in general rather grumpily disposed, since I was on stressful work visits, and didn't have a lot of free time to relax and explore. Even worse, both times I managed to catch the place during an untypically hot spell. Kunming is nicknamed 'The Spring City' and prides itself on the fact that it enjoys sunny-but-mild weather at almost any time of the year. I had a wretched time there before mainly because the weather was uncomfortably hot (and quite humid too), making it difficult to get around much on foot. This time, it lived up to its reputation, with some quite blissful weather.
What's more, they seem to have somehow achieved a dramatic reduction in the city's traffic. Things are still quite congested on the major roads at peak times, but overall it looks to me as though the volume of traffic is down by at least 30%, maybe 50% on what I saw there a few years ago (most people seem to be using scooters rather than cars now). Consequently, the air quality is much better too. I don't know how they've worked this miracle, but other cities need to take note and follow suit.
And it's not nearly such an horrendous urban sprawl as Beijing or Shanghai. That 8 million population figure encompasses quite a wide area of the surrounding countryside; the number of people living within the city itself is probably less than half that.
My complaints, however, about the homogeneity of the recent building and the despoliation of the natural environment by rapid industrialization still stand. Kunming 8 or 10 years ago was probably quite delightful, and still had a distinctive character of its own. Now, it is inexorably merging into the undifferentiated mass of modern urban China, slowly losing its individuality, its charm. It is very depressing to see this process under way almost everywhere you go in this country.
4 comments:
The really big question is: is Internet access better anywhere in China than in Beijing???
And as an aside, does it become more difficult to find English-language conversation and services as you move farther out?
The Internet picture is very complex and uncertain. There can be huge - and unfathomable - variations even between different neighbourhoods in Beijing, never mind between cities at opposite ends of the country.
I suspect that Beijing is probably one of the worse places - partly because its modernization has lagged behind that of much of the rest of China, and its telecoms infrastructure is still not great; and partly because, as it's the seat of government, the authorities here are particularly paranoid about attempting to control the flow of information, and the degree of filtering we have to suffer is often far more intense than most other places have to suffer.
Things seem to be especially bad at the moment. I assume this is because we've got another national anniversary looming AND a handover of power from Hu Jintao to Xi Jinping.
Although there are occasional paradoxical exceptions (I was amazed to find a few years ago that several street vendors I encountered in the city of Wuhan in central China spoke remarkably good English!), in general you encounter very few foreigners, almost no foreigner-targeted venues or services, and little or no English outside of the major cities on the coast.
I used to think the amount of English spoken in Beijing was very limited, compared to places like Shanghai and Guangzhou (and even Tianjin), but big strides have been made in the last few years - particularly in the service industries. When I first came here nearly 10 years ago, it was very rare for bar staff to speak much English; now, they all do.
I must say, I had a much more positive experience of Kunming this time than on my two previous visits. I think perhaps I should add a footnote to this post, by way of apology.
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