Urban[sch]isms

2. Peri-urban condition

2.1. Outline

Apart from bustling new cities of China that permeate into a domain of conurbations - economic centers of new Chinese development - there exists another kind of reality. This reality is in the shadow of prosperous new cities, and if it were entirely up to the Chinese themselves, it would be hidden far, far away from foreign sight. We are talking about places without which Chinese economical powerhouses would not be possible at all ­– places of intense industrial production that fuel the Chinese march toward global economy. These areas confronted are mixtures of agriculture, industry and low-end housing. We are talking about the domain of hard working people, laboring day and night in assembly and production plants. This is a home to China's strength - lower class diligent workers and farmers, the production force of new Chinese economy.

Dongguan basin is one of such places. These lands are a dense weave of kilometers of industrial plants mixed together with village-like housing and agricultural patches. As the economical standard of people living here is not great, the consequences ripple throughout the social and spatial landscape. Scarce and degraded public spaces with only rudimentary services and no leisure activities are combined with only basic education facilities – no universities, no theaters or cinemas. A vast population of millions, that can easily rival any European city in area and density alike, is living in village-like conurbations.

This unique condition, endemic to China, has not been seen anywhere else in the developing countries. The basis for existence of these vast peri-urban production areas is a complex mix of geographic, cultural and historical (political) reasons. Let us examine a few of them that led Dongguan basin to what it is today.

The geographical position of the Dongguan area (see page 8) contributes substantially to this socio-spatial condition. Its strategic location between the Shenzhen urban basin and agricultural rural hinterland ticks all three boxes for successful industrial production areas: good infrastructural connections to Shenzhen and thus Hong Kong, cheap land for new industrial developments and abundance of cheap labour workforce from the north agrarian provinces.

The other important reason is a much more complex mix of history and policies. Main actors of this reasoning are the communistic past, Chinese “social economy” and a unique business organizational model called Town Village Enterprise (TVE) that was born in Dongguan.

China's communistic regime had to come up with regulations of the market and goods that would not resemble capitalism. Instead of talking about market economy, the operating concept was “material balances” where basic needs were collectively provided, thus inhibiting the role of currency as mechanism of the capitalistic market. This had severe repercussions on Chinese organization, one of them being China's self-sufficiency and autarkist economical production. China had to survive without foreign investments, hence needing a high internal rate of savings (Ad lib.: Friedmann, 2005: 10-11).

The core of savings came from hard working rural areas that fueled the industrialization of cities. That was strictly managed by the communistic regime by means of employing several policies to manage the flow of goods. Two more important policies were the institutionalized commune system and household registration system – Hukou. The commune system, with its smallest part called “work-unit”, was a socialistic masterpiece of “teaching” people how to live, thus creating a socialistic society. “The work-unit compound serves as the locus for organization of many facets of life…” (Ibid.: 13). The Hukou system tied the farmers to their land and urbanites to the “machinic” cities geared toward industrial production, hence enabling management of industrial production in cities and agricultural in the rural areas. It prohibited farmers to migrate to the cities in search of better life.

The communistic regime realized that small economical yields of food production and inflexible state owned industrial complexes can not sustain the material balances. To battle this, they adopted some of the already happening phenomenon and made them official: bigger regional self-governance and shift from food to industrial production as the national economic base, thus allowing for industrialization of rural areas. The communes were disbanded and the land went into family ownership with assigned production quotas.

The conditions outlined above led to a unique Chinese form of local group entrepreneurship called Town Village Enterprise (TVE):

“They arose in the 1980s in response to the de-collectivization of agriculture, which freed a number of underemployed villagers for other occupations. At the same time the central government passed on responsibility to the local level to manage the new labour available […]. Rather than passing into a private enterprise system, this encouraged the development of a local state corporatism [a lecture learned from rural commune system].” (Walcott, 2003: 92-93)

The TVE lifted individual villagers and local officials from poverty over night, giving them immense wealth and power. The TVEs operate in a gray zone between private and state ownership that well accommodates personal favors and corruption. This condition also propels the uncontrolled development of peri-urban industrialization with all of its social and spatial implications mentioned above.