Arrival City: The Final Migration and Our Next World - Softcover
From one of Canada's leading journalists comes a major book about how the movement of populations from rural to urban areas on the margins is reshaping our world. These transitional spaces are where the next great economic and cultural boom will be born, or where the great explosion of violence will occur. The difference depends on our ability to notice.
The twenty-first century is going to be remembered for the great, and final, shift of human populations out of rural, agricultural life into cities. The movement engages an unprecedented number of people, perhaps a third of the world's population, and will affect almost everyone in tangible ways. The last human movement of this size and scope, and the changes it will bring to family life, from large agrarian families to small urban ones, will put an end to the major theme of human history: continuous population growth.
Arrival City offers a detailed tour of the key places of the "final migration" and explores the possibilities and pitfalls inherent in the developing new world order. From villages in China, India, Bangladesh and Poland to the international cities of the world, Doug Saunders portrays a diverse group of people as they struggle to make the transition, and in telling the story of their journeys — and the history of their often multi-generational families enmeshed in the struggle of transition — gives an often surprising sense of what factors aid in the creation of a stable, productive community.
From the Hardcover edition.
The twenty-first century is going to be remembered for the great, and final, shift of human populations out of rural, agricultural life into cities. The movement engages an unprecedented number of people, perhaps a third of the world's population, and will affect almost everyone in tangible ways. The last human movement of this size and scope, and the changes it will bring to family life, from large agrarian families to small urban ones, will put an end to the major theme of human history: continuous population growth.
Arrival City offers a detailed tour of the key places of the "final migration" and explores the possibilities and pitfalls inherent in the developing new world order. From villages in China, India, Bangladesh and Poland to the international cities of the world, Doug Saunders portrays a diverse group of people as they struggle to make the transition, and in telling the story of their journeys — and the history of their often multi-generational families enmeshed in the struggle of transition — gives an often surprising sense of what factors aid in the creation of a stable, productive community.
From the Hardcover edition.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author:
DOUG SAUNDERS is the European Bureau Chief of the Globe and Mail and the author of a popular and award-winning column devoted to intellectual ideas and social developments behind the news. He has won four National Newspaper Awards. He is based in London, England.
From the Hardcover edition.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
From the Hardcover edition.
1
ON THE EDGE OF THE CITY
Liu Gong Li, China
It begins with a village. To an outsider, the village seems fixed, timeless, devoid of motion or change, isolated from the larger world. We consign it to nature. To those who might glance at its jumble of low buildings from a passing vehicle, the village seems a tranquil place of ordered, subtle beauty. We imagine a pleasant rhythm of life, free from the strains of modernity. Its small cluster of weathered shacks is nestled into the crest of a modest valley. A few animals move in their pens, children run along the edge of a field, a thin plume of smoke rises from one of the huts, an old man strolls in the patch of forest on the crest, a cloth sack on his back.
The man is named Xu Qin Quan, and he is searching for a cure. He walks down the ancient stone pathway alongside terraced fields toward the small glade on the valley floor, as members of his family have done for 10 generations. Here he finds the remedies he has known since childhood: the slender stalks of ma huang, for sweating away a cold; the leafy branches of gou qi zi, for mending the liver. He slices the stalks with his pocket knife, stacks them in his bag and walks back to the crest. There, he stands for a while, looking at the eruptions of dust rising to the north, where a construction crew is turning the narrow, bumpy road into a broad, paved boulevard. A journey north to Chongqing and back, once an all-day affair, will soon take no more than two hours. Mr. Xu watches the dust plumes turn the distant trees ochre. He considers the larger suffering, the pain that has racked their lives and killed their children and held them in decades of food panic followed by years of paralyzing tedium. That night, at a village meeting, he proffers the larger cure. After tonight, he says, we shall stop being a village.
It is 1995, and the village is called Liu Gong Li. Very little about its appearance, its families or its thoroughly unmechanized cultivation of wheat and corn has changed in centuries. It got its name, which means Six Kilometres, during the building of the Burma Road, when the great inland city of Chongqing was the eastern terminus. That name, for decades after the Second World War, was a fantasy, for the original bridge to the big city had been bombed, and the nearest replacement, many kilometres away, was impassable enough to make the journey economically pointless, even if the Communist Party had allowed it. The little village had no connection to any city, or any market. It farmed for itself. The soil, and the rudimentary farming methods, never provided quite enough food for everyone. Every few years, the vicissitudes of weather and politics would produce a famine, and people would die, children would starve. In the terrible years of 1959 through 1961, the village lost a large portion of its population. Starvation ended two decades later, replaced by a scraping, passionless dependency on government subsidies. In Liu Gong Li, as in peasant villages around the world, nobody sees rural life as tranquil, or natural, or as anything but a monotonous, frightening gamble. In the final decade of the twentieth century, when China embraced a form of capitalism, the villages here were suddenly permitted to develop non-arable land for market purposes. So when Mr. Xu suggested his remedy, there was no dissension: all the land would be declared non-arable. From that moment, it stopped being a village and became a destination for villagers.
Fifteen years later, Liu Gong Li reveals itself as a spectre at the side of a traffic-clotted four-lane boulevard a kilometre into the city: amidst a forest of apartment towers, there unfolds a glimmering mirage of grey and brown cubes cascading across hillsides as far as the eye can see, an utterly random crystal formation that has obliterated the landscape. Closer, the crystals materialize into houses and shops, jagged brick and concrete dwellings of two or three storeys assembled by their occupants without plan or permission, cantilevered over one another, jutting at unlikely angles. Within 10 years of Mr. Xu’s prescription, his village of 70 had gained more than 10,000 residents; within a dozen years, it had fused with neighbouring ex-villages into a solid agglomeration of 120,000 people, few of whom officially reside here. It is no longer a distant village, or even a place on the far outskirts; it is a key and integral part of Chongqing, a city of some 10 million people packed in and around a skyscraper peninsula that resembles Manhattan in both its density of population and its intensity of activity. With more than 200,000 people a year being added to its population and 4 million unregistered migrants within its borders, it is very likely the world’s fastest-growing city.*
* The title “fastest-growing city” has a number of legitimate claimants, including Dhaka and Lagos, because it has a number of meanings: it can be the place that adds the largest number of people every year (a measure that favours large cities), the place whose population increases by the largest proportion (a measure that favours small cities) or the place with the highest increase in its rate of growth. However, with a growth rate approaching 4 per cent per year across its wider metropolitan district (whose population is 32 million), Chongqing qualifies by any measure.
That growth is largely driven by the multiplication of places like Liu Gong Li, self-built settlements of rural escapees, known in China simply as urban “villages” (cun), hundreds of which flourish around the city’s perimeter, even if city authorities do not acknowledge their existence. Their streets and blocks are tightly organized by the villages and regions from which their residents come; residents refer to their urban neighbours who’ve arrived from their own rural regions as tongxiang—literally “homies.” At least 40 million peasants join these urban enclaves across China each year, though a good number—perhaps half—end up returning to their rural village, out of hardship, desperation or personal taste. Those who stay tend to be deeply determined.
To an outsider, Liu Gong Li is a fetid slum. The old pathway into the valley is now a busy street overhung with a shambles of thrown-together houses, its dirt laneway lined with phone shops, butchers, huge steaming woks full of pungent peppers at streetside eateries, merchants hawking clothes, tools, fast-spinning bobbins of thread, a cacophony of commerce spiralling away for two kilometres into dizzying back pathways and snaking staircases whose ungrounded perspectives resemble an upturned Escher engraving. Electrical and cable television lines fill the air; raw sewage spills from the concrete, runs down the sides of buildings, cascades along open gutters into a terrible stinking river beneath the concrete bridges at the foot of the valley. Garbage and waste are seemingly everywhere, accumulating in a small mountain behind the houses. A chaos of vehicles with two, three and four wheels clots every lane. There is no space without people, without activity, and none to be seen with greenery. It might seem, from this vantage, that this is a hellish refuge for the destitute, a last-ditch landing pad for the failed outcasts of an enormous nation—a place for those on the way downward.
The true nature of places like Liu Gong Li becomes evident when you walk off the main lane into the rough dirt side streets that descend into the valley. Behind each window, each crude opening in the concrete, is a clatter of activity. On the crest of the valley, near the place where Mr. Xu made his big decision in 1995, you are drawn to a noisy cinder-block rectangle, jammed into a steep corner, exuding a pleasant cedar scent. It is the shop-cum-home of 39-year-old Wang Jian and his family. Four years before, Mr. Wang moved here from the village of Nan Chung, 80 kilometres away, with the money he had saved from two years of carpentry work, a total of 700 renminbi ($102).* He rented a tiny room, accumulated some scrap wood and iron and began building, by hand, traditional Chinese wooden bathtubs, which have become popular with the new middle class. These took two days to make, and he sold them for a profit of R50 ($7.30) each. After a year, he had earned enough to get power tools and a bigger shop. He brought over his wife, his son, his son’s wife and their infant grandson. They all sleep, cook, wash and eat in a windowless area in the back, behind a plastic curtain, in a space that is even more exposed and cramped than the dirt-floor hut they endured in the village.
* All figures in this book are converted to United States dollars.
But there is no talk of returning: this, filth and all, is the better life. “Here, you can turn your grandchildren into successful people if you find the right way to make a living—in the village you can only live,” says Mr. Wang, in boisterous Sichuan dialect, as he bends an iron strap around a tub. “I’d say about a fifth of the people who’ve left my village have ended up starting their own businesses. And almost everybody has left the village—there are just old people left. It has become a hollow village.”
Mr. Wang and his wife still send a third of their earnings back to the village, to support their two surviving retired parents, and the year before, he’d bought a small restaurant down the road in Liu Gong Li, for his son to run. Mr. Wang’s margins are tiny, because the competition is intense: there are 12 other wood-bathtub factories in Chongqing, one of them also located in Liu Gong Li. “Mine has the highest output,” he says, “but we’re not necessarily the most profitable.” So it will be years of saving, and hoping for the best in the bathtub trade, before they will be able to buy their own apartment, send their grandson to university and get out of Liu Gong Li—although by then, if the dream comes true, Liu Gong Li might have evolved into the sort of place where they’d want to stay.
All down the valley, the grey cubism materializes into a quilt of tiny, officially non-existent industries hidden behind ramshackle concrete slum buildings. Down the street from the bathtub shop is an exceptionally noisy place where 20 employees are making metal security railings; a little farther, a shop making custom walk-in refrigerators; a powdered-paint blending shop; a place churning out computer-guided embroidery patterns on half a dozen massive machines; a factory making electric-motor windings; a sour-smelling place where barely teenaged workers hunched over heat-sealing machines make inflatable beach toys; similar family shops, of every description, making shop displays, vinyl-frame windows, extruded industrial air-conditioning ducts, cheap wood cabinetry, ornamental wooden bed frames, high-voltage transformers, computer-lathe-milled motorcycle parts and stainless-steel restaurant range hoods. These factories, most of whose goods are destined for Asian consumers, were all launched during the previous dozen years by villagers who arrived here or by the former employees of the first wave of villagers.
In every unpainted concrete cube, it is the same rhythm of arrival, struggle, support, saving, planning, calculation. Everyone who lives in Liu Gong Li, and all 120,000 people in this strip of land, has arrived, since 1995, from a rural village. Everyone who remains here beyond a few months has decided to stay for the long haul, despite the filth and the crowding and the difficulty of life, and even though their children are often left behind with family members back in the village, because they have decided that it is a better life. Most have endured extraordinarily long odysseys of self-denial and austere deprivation. Almost all send money, quite often almost all of their earnings, back to support the village and put some into savings for their children’s education here in the city. All are engaged in a daily calculation that involves the unbearable burden of rural deprivation, the impossible expense of full-fledged urban life and the broken pathway of opportunities that might someday form a bridge between the two.
In other words, the main function of this place is arrival. Liu Gong Li, like millions of other new and peripheral urban neighbourhoods around the world, performs a specific set of functions. It is not merely a place for living and working, for sleeping and eating and shopping; it is most importantly a place of transition. Almost all of its important activities, beyond mere survival, exist to bring villagers, and entire villages, into the urban sphere, into the centre of social and economic life, into education and acculturation and belonging, into sustainable prosperity. The arrival city is both populated with people in transition—for it turns outsiders into central, “core” urbanites with sustainable social, economic and political futures in the city—and is itself a place in transition, for its streets, homes and established families will either someday become part of the core city itself or will fail and decay into poverty or be destroyed.
The arrival city can be readily distinguished from other urban neighbourhoods, not only by its rural-immigrant population, its improvised appearance and ever-changing nature, but also by the constant linkages it makes, from every street and every house and every workplace, in two directions. It is linked in a lasting and intensive way to its originating villages, constantly sending people and money and knowledge back and forth, making possible the next wave of migrations from the village, facilitating within the village the care of older generations and the education of younger ones, financing the improvement of the village. And it is linked in important and deeply engaged ways to the established city. Its political institutions, business relationships, social networks and transactions are all footholds intended to give new village arrivals a purchase, however fragile, on the edge of the larger society, and to give them a place to push themselves, and their children, further into the centre, into acceptability, into connectedness. Liu Gong Li makes many things, sells many things and houses many people, but all with one overarching goal, one project that unites its mad range of activities. Liu Gong Li is an arrival city. Here, on the periphery, is the new centre of the world.
At the crest of the valley, a short, steep walk up the curved gravel road from the factory-packed valley floor, is an especially dense conglomeration of concrete buildings. If you enter an alley behind a small restaurant, then cut through a labyrinth of tunnels and narrow passageways surrounded by high walls, you will reach a small grey courtyard. It is a tranquil spot amidst the chaos of the slum, with low wooden stools surrounding a small table. The air is filled with the pungent smells of Sichuan cooking and the remote sounds of motors, babies crying, shouted commands, horns. Crouched near the table is an old man, dressed in the traditional green cloth jacket and beaten canvas shoes of a peasant, and a Nike baseball cap. Beside him is a conical bamboo hat fill...
ON THE EDGE OF THE CITY
Liu Gong Li, China
It begins with a village. To an outsider, the village seems fixed, timeless, devoid of motion or change, isolated from the larger world. We consign it to nature. To those who might glance at its jumble of low buildings from a passing vehicle, the village seems a tranquil place of ordered, subtle beauty. We imagine a pleasant rhythm of life, free from the strains of modernity. Its small cluster of weathered shacks is nestled into the crest of a modest valley. A few animals move in their pens, children run along the edge of a field, a thin plume of smoke rises from one of the huts, an old man strolls in the patch of forest on the crest, a cloth sack on his back.
The man is named Xu Qin Quan, and he is searching for a cure. He walks down the ancient stone pathway alongside terraced fields toward the small glade on the valley floor, as members of his family have done for 10 generations. Here he finds the remedies he has known since childhood: the slender stalks of ma huang, for sweating away a cold; the leafy branches of gou qi zi, for mending the liver. He slices the stalks with his pocket knife, stacks them in his bag and walks back to the crest. There, he stands for a while, looking at the eruptions of dust rising to the north, where a construction crew is turning the narrow, bumpy road into a broad, paved boulevard. A journey north to Chongqing and back, once an all-day affair, will soon take no more than two hours. Mr. Xu watches the dust plumes turn the distant trees ochre. He considers the larger suffering, the pain that has racked their lives and killed their children and held them in decades of food panic followed by years of paralyzing tedium. That night, at a village meeting, he proffers the larger cure. After tonight, he says, we shall stop being a village.
It is 1995, and the village is called Liu Gong Li. Very little about its appearance, its families or its thoroughly unmechanized cultivation of wheat and corn has changed in centuries. It got its name, which means Six Kilometres, during the building of the Burma Road, when the great inland city of Chongqing was the eastern terminus. That name, for decades after the Second World War, was a fantasy, for the original bridge to the big city had been bombed, and the nearest replacement, many kilometres away, was impassable enough to make the journey economically pointless, even if the Communist Party had allowed it. The little village had no connection to any city, or any market. It farmed for itself. The soil, and the rudimentary farming methods, never provided quite enough food for everyone. Every few years, the vicissitudes of weather and politics would produce a famine, and people would die, children would starve. In the terrible years of 1959 through 1961, the village lost a large portion of its population. Starvation ended two decades later, replaced by a scraping, passionless dependency on government subsidies. In Liu Gong Li, as in peasant villages around the world, nobody sees rural life as tranquil, or natural, or as anything but a monotonous, frightening gamble. In the final decade of the twentieth century, when China embraced a form of capitalism, the villages here were suddenly permitted to develop non-arable land for market purposes. So when Mr. Xu suggested his remedy, there was no dissension: all the land would be declared non-arable. From that moment, it stopped being a village and became a destination for villagers.
Fifteen years later, Liu Gong Li reveals itself as a spectre at the side of a traffic-clotted four-lane boulevard a kilometre into the city: amidst a forest of apartment towers, there unfolds a glimmering mirage of grey and brown cubes cascading across hillsides as far as the eye can see, an utterly random crystal formation that has obliterated the landscape. Closer, the crystals materialize into houses and shops, jagged brick and concrete dwellings of two or three storeys assembled by their occupants without plan or permission, cantilevered over one another, jutting at unlikely angles. Within 10 years of Mr. Xu’s prescription, his village of 70 had gained more than 10,000 residents; within a dozen years, it had fused with neighbouring ex-villages into a solid agglomeration of 120,000 people, few of whom officially reside here. It is no longer a distant village, or even a place on the far outskirts; it is a key and integral part of Chongqing, a city of some 10 million people packed in and around a skyscraper peninsula that resembles Manhattan in both its density of population and its intensity of activity. With more than 200,000 people a year being added to its population and 4 million unregistered migrants within its borders, it is very likely the world’s fastest-growing city.*
* The title “fastest-growing city” has a number of legitimate claimants, including Dhaka and Lagos, because it has a number of meanings: it can be the place that adds the largest number of people every year (a measure that favours large cities), the place whose population increases by the largest proportion (a measure that favours small cities) or the place with the highest increase in its rate of growth. However, with a growth rate approaching 4 per cent per year across its wider metropolitan district (whose population is 32 million), Chongqing qualifies by any measure.
That growth is largely driven by the multiplication of places like Liu Gong Li, self-built settlements of rural escapees, known in China simply as urban “villages” (cun), hundreds of which flourish around the city’s perimeter, even if city authorities do not acknowledge their existence. Their streets and blocks are tightly organized by the villages and regions from which their residents come; residents refer to their urban neighbours who’ve arrived from their own rural regions as tongxiang—literally “homies.” At least 40 million peasants join these urban enclaves across China each year, though a good number—perhaps half—end up returning to their rural village, out of hardship, desperation or personal taste. Those who stay tend to be deeply determined.
To an outsider, Liu Gong Li is a fetid slum. The old pathway into the valley is now a busy street overhung with a shambles of thrown-together houses, its dirt laneway lined with phone shops, butchers, huge steaming woks full of pungent peppers at streetside eateries, merchants hawking clothes, tools, fast-spinning bobbins of thread, a cacophony of commerce spiralling away for two kilometres into dizzying back pathways and snaking staircases whose ungrounded perspectives resemble an upturned Escher engraving. Electrical and cable television lines fill the air; raw sewage spills from the concrete, runs down the sides of buildings, cascades along open gutters into a terrible stinking river beneath the concrete bridges at the foot of the valley. Garbage and waste are seemingly everywhere, accumulating in a small mountain behind the houses. A chaos of vehicles with two, three and four wheels clots every lane. There is no space without people, without activity, and none to be seen with greenery. It might seem, from this vantage, that this is a hellish refuge for the destitute, a last-ditch landing pad for the failed outcasts of an enormous nation—a place for those on the way downward.
The true nature of places like Liu Gong Li becomes evident when you walk off the main lane into the rough dirt side streets that descend into the valley. Behind each window, each crude opening in the concrete, is a clatter of activity. On the crest of the valley, near the place where Mr. Xu made his big decision in 1995, you are drawn to a noisy cinder-block rectangle, jammed into a steep corner, exuding a pleasant cedar scent. It is the shop-cum-home of 39-year-old Wang Jian and his family. Four years before, Mr. Wang moved here from the village of Nan Chung, 80 kilometres away, with the money he had saved from two years of carpentry work, a total of 700 renminbi ($102).* He rented a tiny room, accumulated some scrap wood and iron and began building, by hand, traditional Chinese wooden bathtubs, which have become popular with the new middle class. These took two days to make, and he sold them for a profit of R50 ($7.30) each. After a year, he had earned enough to get power tools and a bigger shop. He brought over his wife, his son, his son’s wife and their infant grandson. They all sleep, cook, wash and eat in a windowless area in the back, behind a plastic curtain, in a space that is even more exposed and cramped than the dirt-floor hut they endured in the village.
* All figures in this book are converted to United States dollars.
But there is no talk of returning: this, filth and all, is the better life. “Here, you can turn your grandchildren into successful people if you find the right way to make a living—in the village you can only live,” says Mr. Wang, in boisterous Sichuan dialect, as he bends an iron strap around a tub. “I’d say about a fifth of the people who’ve left my village have ended up starting their own businesses. And almost everybody has left the village—there are just old people left. It has become a hollow village.”
Mr. Wang and his wife still send a third of their earnings back to the village, to support their two surviving retired parents, and the year before, he’d bought a small restaurant down the road in Liu Gong Li, for his son to run. Mr. Wang’s margins are tiny, because the competition is intense: there are 12 other wood-bathtub factories in Chongqing, one of them also located in Liu Gong Li. “Mine has the highest output,” he says, “but we’re not necessarily the most profitable.” So it will be years of saving, and hoping for the best in the bathtub trade, before they will be able to buy their own apartment, send their grandson to university and get out of Liu Gong Li—although by then, if the dream comes true, Liu Gong Li might have evolved into the sort of place where they’d want to stay.
All down the valley, the grey cubism materializes into a quilt of tiny, officially non-existent industries hidden behind ramshackle concrete slum buildings. Down the street from the bathtub shop is an exceptionally noisy place where 20 employees are making metal security railings; a little farther, a shop making custom walk-in refrigerators; a powdered-paint blending shop; a place churning out computer-guided embroidery patterns on half a dozen massive machines; a factory making electric-motor windings; a sour-smelling place where barely teenaged workers hunched over heat-sealing machines make inflatable beach toys; similar family shops, of every description, making shop displays, vinyl-frame windows, extruded industrial air-conditioning ducts, cheap wood cabinetry, ornamental wooden bed frames, high-voltage transformers, computer-lathe-milled motorcycle parts and stainless-steel restaurant range hoods. These factories, most of whose goods are destined for Asian consumers, were all launched during the previous dozen years by villagers who arrived here or by the former employees of the first wave of villagers.
In every unpainted concrete cube, it is the same rhythm of arrival, struggle, support, saving, planning, calculation. Everyone who lives in Liu Gong Li, and all 120,000 people in this strip of land, has arrived, since 1995, from a rural village. Everyone who remains here beyond a few months has decided to stay for the long haul, despite the filth and the crowding and the difficulty of life, and even though their children are often left behind with family members back in the village, because they have decided that it is a better life. Most have endured extraordinarily long odysseys of self-denial and austere deprivation. Almost all send money, quite often almost all of their earnings, back to support the village and put some into savings for their children’s education here in the city. All are engaged in a daily calculation that involves the unbearable burden of rural deprivation, the impossible expense of full-fledged urban life and the broken pathway of opportunities that might someday form a bridge between the two.
In other words, the main function of this place is arrival. Liu Gong Li, like millions of other new and peripheral urban neighbourhoods around the world, performs a specific set of functions. It is not merely a place for living and working, for sleeping and eating and shopping; it is most importantly a place of transition. Almost all of its important activities, beyond mere survival, exist to bring villagers, and entire villages, into the urban sphere, into the centre of social and economic life, into education and acculturation and belonging, into sustainable prosperity. The arrival city is both populated with people in transition—for it turns outsiders into central, “core” urbanites with sustainable social, economic and political futures in the city—and is itself a place in transition, for its streets, homes and established families will either someday become part of the core city itself or will fail and decay into poverty or be destroyed.
The arrival city can be readily distinguished from other urban neighbourhoods, not only by its rural-immigrant population, its improvised appearance and ever-changing nature, but also by the constant linkages it makes, from every street and every house and every workplace, in two directions. It is linked in a lasting and intensive way to its originating villages, constantly sending people and money and knowledge back and forth, making possible the next wave of migrations from the village, facilitating within the village the care of older generations and the education of younger ones, financing the improvement of the village. And it is linked in important and deeply engaged ways to the established city. Its political institutions, business relationships, social networks and transactions are all footholds intended to give new village arrivals a purchase, however fragile, on the edge of the larger society, and to give them a place to push themselves, and their children, further into the centre, into acceptability, into connectedness. Liu Gong Li makes many things, sells many things and houses many people, but all with one overarching goal, one project that unites its mad range of activities. Liu Gong Li is an arrival city. Here, on the periphery, is the new centre of the world.
At the crest of the valley, a short, steep walk up the curved gravel road from the factory-packed valley floor, is an especially dense conglomeration of concrete buildings. If you enter an alley behind a small restaurant, then cut through a labyrinth of tunnels and narrow passageways surrounded by high walls, you will reach a small grey courtyard. It is a tranquil spot amidst the chaos of the slum, with low wooden stools surrounding a small table. The air is filled with the pungent smells of Sichuan cooking and the remote sounds of motors, babies crying, shouted commands, horns. Crouched near the table is an old man, dressed in the traditional green cloth jacket and beaten canvas shoes of a peasant, and a Nike baseball cap. Beside him is a conical bamboo hat fill...
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