Spring Festival Travels 2014: Guiyang – China’s Worst Planned City?

If two years of urban planning school left me with anything, it is the privilege and responsibility of occasionally passing judgment on the quality of planning in Chinese cities.  I may not be able to back up the claim that Guiyang is China’s worst-planned city, but seriously, it takes certain issues typical of Chinese city planning and stretches them to mind-boggling extremes.

A bit of context: Guiyang is the capital of the autonomous region of Guizhou.  Guizhou is called an autonomous region and not a province because there are a lot of ethnic minorities there, though in practice the autonomy thing is kind of just for show.  Guizhou is one of the poorest parts of the country and may actually claim the title of poorest province/region.  That poverty is generally not on display in the capital of Guiyang, but after staying there a few days I could feel that it was a smaller, grittier place than most capitals – it felt like it was carved out of the rural backwater, rather than dominating it like the capitals to the east.  Like any Chinese city worth its salt, though, Guiyang is growing and developing very fast, and has imbibed as orthodoxy many planning practices that worked well on the coast, and exaggerated them in some cases.

Case in point: Guiyang is building an entirely new version itself just outside the traditional city limits, and much larger than the old downtown.  Every big Chinese city is building one of these “new cities” to accommodate future growth (and create massive opportunities for kickbacks between the cabal of government officials and real estate developers).  I did not get much of a feel for Guiyang’s new city save that it is in a very early stage.  Actually it mostly seems to be roads and other infrastructure these days, forming a massive grid within which there are a few land plots built up into shiny new high-rises and government buildings. But still, mostly empty.

It is deep, deep within this shell of a city that Guiyang has built its long-distance bus station.  Yes, there seems to be only one.  Other big cities have as many stations as there are points on the compass, as well as a big depot near the downtown train station and one or two newer, more modern ones in the periphery.  Guiyang for some reason has deemed fit to do away with all the downtown ones and push all its chips into a single huge station in the middle of nowhere.  This station is farther away from downtown than the damn Guiyang airport! Perhaps one day this station will be the centerpiece of a thriving, modern new city that has risen up all around it, but for now it’s so isolated to hardly feel part of Guiyang at all.

It makes a terrible first impression for those arriving by bus.  Upon getting off, you are assaulted by touts peddling overpriced transportation, tours, and lodging.  You think they are an overwhelming nuisance until you pass through a rattling set of turnstiles and realize they were just the touts clever enough to sneak inside the boarding area – the rest of them have set up a veritable carnival of exploitation just outside the station.  Travelers wishing to avoid black market taxis, shady hotel operators, and sellers of strange-smelling meat on sticks must run the gauntlet to escape from them.  I found no taxi line to speak of – just a mass of travelers pushing and shoving to haggle prices with an equal mass of cabs whose drivers had no intention using the meter to take one anywhere. They know a captive audience when they see it.  Follow the signs to the city bus terminals in hopes of finding a fairer ride downtown, only to find nothing but disappointment there too – packed buses rolling away from platforms full of crowds deep enough to have filled them two or three times over. Electronic signs hanging from the ceiling note there is a forty-five minute interval between each departure – that’s the kind of wait you endure in a part of town so remote it barely qualifies as a suburb.  As you look at the shivering crowd of people and try to estimate how many forty-five minute waits you will need to endure before departing.  A few peasants bearing baskets work the line, selling corn to travelers grateful to avoid starving to death so close to their final destination.

Overall, the Guiyang bus station is a real kick in the teeth for people who bought bus tickets clearly marked “Guiyang” but are instead dropped off deep in the outskirts, potentially hours from their homes or hotels.  Though very large, it also seems to have been built on the cheap, with little in the way of climate control.  The picture above shows the ticket sales area early one morning – I hadn’t noticed my lens frosting over.  The waiting rooms were spare, and the station seemed to outsource most amenities like dining to the mass of fruit sellers and food carts outside.  Pro-tip: when planning your trip to Guiyang, take the train!

(On both my trips through the bus station, I skipped both the crooked taxis and the buses, and instead started marching in the general direction of downtown.  It would have taken several hours to walk all the way there, but in both cases I managed to hail taxis which already had passengers – but whose drivers were willing to take me along for a very reasonable under the table fee. I considered myself lucky in both cases, since cars of any kind – let alone taxis – were hard to find deep in the underdeveloped new city).

Of course, I wouldn’t be crowning Guiyang as China’s worst-planned city if it just had problems with its new district and bus station. Every city has a few issues with those.  Unfortunately, Guiyang’s downtown is something of a mess as well, particularly in terms of pedestrian planning.  Simply put, central Guiyang is one of the most unpleasant urban environments I have ever tried to walk through in China.  Almost every sidewalk – even on the many minor two-lane roads that run away from the main avenues – is fenced off from the street, including at intersections.

This was probably done to forcibly break local pedestrians’ habit of jay-walking.  Now look – I’m no proponent of jay-walking and agree in principle its a dangerous practice that imperils drivers and walkers alike – but the car-driving elites and middle classes of cities like Guiyang bring the plague of jaywalkers upon themselves by planning cities as playgrounds for cars without making adequate provision for the vast majority of residents who still walk almost everywhere.  If, as the city government, you space out designated pedestrian crossings as much as 500 yards apart, and then expect pedestrians to make detour after time-consuming detour just to walk in a straight line, then your automobile traffic deserves to be interrupted by the oppressed lower classes taking matters into their own hands.  The fieldwork photographs of Western planners researching in China are replete with images of pedestrians breaking down or clambering over artfully pruned rows of shrubbery so that they can cross the road in a place that is convenient for them rather than the spot up the street where the city has seen fit to build a bridge.  Good for them, I say.  La Resistance lives on.

While in most cities this silent, populist jay-walking rebellion lives on in more-or-less peaceful coexistence with the car drivers, Guiyang has fought back with surprising ferocity, corralling pedestrians onto designated walkways and crossings with the most elaborate network of fences, tunnels, and bridges I’ve ever seen.  The result is a pedestrian experience that seems inspired by nothing less than the 1930s Fritz Lang film “Metropolis”, in which the downtrodden masses are permitted to share the sunlight with the car-driving elites when it suits them, but are driven beneath the surface the moment their presence becomes an inconvenience.

Beneath the surface with you, plebs.

Virtually every intersection downtown is crossed only by a bridge or tunnel. Mostly tunnels. And good gravy tunnels they are.  They are shockingly deep – you will climb down the equivalent of a three or four-storey building just to walk up it again a few seconds later after you’ve passed through the tunnel.  Multiply this by a half dozen or more intersections crossed on a given trek through the center, and you’ve just murdered the Guiyang market for Stairmasters in its infancy.  Even more cruelly, most intersections are designed with a total of eight staircases (two for each corner), all of which curve inward at a 30-45 degree angle as you descend to the tunnel’s depths.  Combine this the fact that most tunnels are laid out in the shape of squares with little or no signage, and I defy you to maintain your underground sense of direction such that you emerge at side of the road you intended.  Most of the tunnels double as mini-shopping arcades, lined with kiosks selling drinks, snacks, trinkets, toys, and cheap electronics – convenient for some, but also discombobulating enough that I got lost over and over again.  I climbed up and down a single tunnel three times once before I got where I was going.  At first I thought that as a newcomer I was just unused to how the tunnels were laid out, but a local told me that the city was famous for having un-navigable underground crossings, and that even seasoned veterans got lost from time to time.

The one upshot from forcing pedestrians to endure all of this punishment should be that car traffic – free from interference – moves pretty smoothly.  I must confess I did not spend enough time in taxis or on buses in Guiyang to tell for sure.  From the outside looking in, the roads seemed fairly typical for big Chinese cities – gridlocked at rush hour, spotty at most other times.

I realize I’ve spent this article ranting about only two problems – the bus station and the downtown treatment of pedestrians.  Probably not enough to argue definitively that it’s China’s worst-planned city.  And anyway, if you are not among the unwashed masses who get around in buses and by foot, you may not even notice any of this.  For most people, though, Guiyang gets a  gentleman’s C at best.

The coming of spring and the ephemerality of small pleasures

I’m cooking up the final batch of articles on this year’s Spring Festival travels, which center on the city of Guiyang – it may well be China’s worst-planned city, but it’s also home to some of its nicest taxi drivers and personable people more generally.  Add in a trip to the country’s largest waterfall in a nearby nature park, and it was a pretty good trip.

For now, though, a quick word on the weather: The bottom fell out of winter over the weekend, with chilly drizzle giving way to blue skies and temperatures in the 70s.  I had a fine time doing errands outside and taking afternoon walks, but the real treat was being able to finally return to my balcony, spending a relaxing evening on the IKEA recliner.  When we moved in a year ago, everything about the new apartment seemed damn near perfect, except I specifically remember being disappointed that we were on a low floor and facing inward into the complex’s central courtyard.  I guess I had been hoping for a repeat of the dramatic skyline views of the old place in Chengdu.  I must admit, though, the courtyard perch has really grown on me over the past year.  The IKEA chair and side table really sealed the deal, making possible evenings and Sunday afternoons spent eating meals, sipping drinks, and reading books while listening to rain or the sounds of families playing around the pond.  

After about mid-November it got too cold to go out there often, and so this week’s conclusion to four months of hibernation has been awaited with much anticipation.  Sad to say then, that on the first day of lazing back in the recliner, my roommate knocked on the sliding glass door to let me know that we were going to have to go to battle with the landlord over raising rents before we renewed the lease for the year.  Rents are up all over the neighborhood now.  What’s more, my roommate informed me that since he’s been admitted to another master’s program in the US, he’ll likely be moving out as early as May – which will leave me with having to search for another roommate, or decamp to a place to live alone more affordably.  I don’t look forward to either.  I guess all good arrangements must come to and end.  

 

Spring Festival 2014 Travels 7: Guilin Day 2

Most of my second day in Guilin was spent in Seven Stars Park, one of several patches of karst mountains near the city that have been converted to public parks.  It was the second recommendation from a new local friend who added me on WeChat the night before – I tried to go to her top choice, but after waiting half an hour at the bus stop, decided to walk the relatively short distance to Seven Stars instead.

This was the day I finally got around to listening to the holiday special articles from The Economist‘s final 2013 issue.  The Economist rings out every by shelving its usual dry commentary on politics and finance, and filling pages instead with a dozen or so long-form pieces on a range of cultural, historical, and other liberal artsy topics.   You can almost feel the writers’ pent-up joy at being able to take a break from the magazine’s usual eat-your-vegetables fare (well-reported and witty though it may be).  The audio edition is if anything even more compelling, with each article takes the form of a bite-size 15-30 minute narrative told in a variety of delicious British accents.  Listening is always such a pleasure, I always make a point to listen to the articles all on one go, preferably while traveling solo when I can be focused on listening.  To this day, these year-end listening experiences are some of the most reliable memory boxes I know of.  Seriously, tell me the article title of any holiday piece published since 2008, and I will tell you exactly where I was and what I was doing as I heard it.

In that spirit, here is the day in Seven Stars Park, article by article:

Cockney Funerals – Listened to tales of funeral parlors and undertakers in increasingly multi-cultural England while waiting with crowds for a bus that never came on Guilin’s main east-west avenue.

Speaking Irish in Belfast – Waited in line for tickets, then darted around travelers posing for photos on a covered bridge crossing a river into Seven Stars Park – all while listening about efforts to keep the Irish language vital.

French Culture – A meditation on the cultural and intellectual roots of why French people are so melancholy.  Set to lively park scene of families crowding around bemused looking monkeys, who climbed trees and sat for pictures on the ground.  People tossed nuts and other snacks despite explicit signs to not feed the monkeys.  Somewhere in the historical discussion of tragedy in French intellectual life,  I was trying to climb one of the park’s seven peaks when the strap on my camera broke and I barely grabbed hold in time to stop it from falling over the edge.  The strap had been fraying for years. I always wondered what I would be doing and where when it finally snapped.  Now I know.

Bow hunting – Discovering most of the “Seven Stars” lack proper climbing trails, I follow paths to circumnavigate a couple instead, following streams through caves whose walls are painted with calligraphy both the size of billboards as well as so small you have to get up close to read it intimately.  Meanwhile, Economist delves into the culture of American b0whunting, starting with Teddy Roosevelt and asking whether the humble bow is a primal answer to a gun culture drained of its masculinity by radars, laser sights, and other high-tech gizmos.

A Tale of Two Rushes –  Economist compares life in Caifornia during the gold rush days to life in North Dakota amidst the fracking boom.  I reach Seven Star’s star attraction, a karst outcropping that for obvious reasons is referred to as “Camel Rock”.   At a shaded picnic area nearby, I sit at the one empty table and have a makeshift lunch of almonds, clementines, and a protein bar.

Murder and slavery in Brazil – Wander through a kids’ rope course while listening to the story of a Southerner so frustrated at defeat in the Civil War, that he relocated to still slave-owning Brazil, where he joined a community of his fellows but later ended up stirring up a mob that killed a local law enforcement officer.  Started climbing the tallest peak to have a hiking trail.

Upwardly Mobile Africa – Come across a marker memorializing hundreds of Chinese troops that fought the Japanese and then retreated into one of the mountain’s caves to hide.  The Japanese found them and gassed them all in their hiding place.  Reach the peak while listening about the life of a African clergyman working near the base of Kilimanjaro.

I took a break from listening to enjoy the view from the top of the hill.  It wasn’t great weather for pictures. The light was very strong, and there was a layer of haze just thick enough to wash out all the color of the sky in photos.  It was a nice view, though.  You could imagine some traveler from millennia before looking at the same scene and deciding it would be a pretty good place to settle down, maybe start a village.

And I got a nice guy with a fancy camera to take a few pictures of me with my phone.

Indian mothers-in-law – Ramble back down the mountain and a pavillion of rock-climbing walls while getting acquainted with the fierce reputation of Indian mummyjis, mothers-in-law that terrorize young wives and are the subject of many long-running TV serials.   After walking for a long time, I rested for about 20 minutes in front of the entrance to a mountain cave.   The cave was one of the park’s star attractions, but it had a steep separate entrance fee and there were big crowds.  I’ve seen caves before back home.

China’s Worst Diplomat –  I got lost trying to climb another one of the Seven Stars until I realized the path was leading back up the same one as before.  I hardly minded the detour, though, given how focused I was on the story of Wanyan Chonghou, an incompetent official from the waning days of the Qing empire who botched every job he was assigned and somehow managed to rise through the ranks anyway, at least until he signed a treaty giving the Russians rewards for a conflict they technically lost.

A Short History of Hotels – Economist goes through the evolutionary stages of the modern hotel industry, noting little details like the number of pornographic films one chain requires be available in each room.  I start walking back to the entrance of the park, past a scenic river and pond scene with the tallest of the Seven Stars in the background.  Many staged photo opportunities with ornate horse-drawn carriages, as well as flowery seats surrounded by peacocks and monkeys.

The Fight Over Doves:  The story of how a legendary typeface was lost after one of the press’ founders decided to drown all of the type in the Thames, as well as modern efforts to revive it.  Meanwhile I exit the park and begin following directions from a local WeChat friend toward a neighborhood where she used to go to school, and where there are many food carts selling a famous local snack.  After a bit of searching and sending photos of my location to the WeChat contact, I find where the carts are gathered and try the snack. It’s like a sandwich made of rice, stuffed with fried dough, pickled vegetables, tofu, and spices.  You can add  a hotdog link if you like, but I decline, because processed meat does not mix well with China’s pretend food regulation system.

The Real Ozymandias – Still hungry after clambering up and around hills all day, I pause for a more restful snack at Beeberry, a local variant of those self-serve, pay-by-weight yogurt joints.   Staff is friendly and boasts of imported technology and syrups.  The Mexican vanilla is some of the best vanilla ice cream I’ve had.  Meanwhile, the Economist wraps up the 2013 holiday edition with a story on the life of Percy Shelley and the origins of Ozymandias the historical figure as well as the famous poem.

I finished out the afternoon in Guilin by heading to restaurant called Northeast Dumpling King for an early supper before catching my bus out of town.  The restaurant is on the main drag and looks bustling – I marked it out early on as a place to get a hearty meal before a long bus ride.  Much to my dismay then when they told me they had no dumplings that day – in a restaurant called Dumpling King!  I ordered some local dishes instead and made the best of it.

The next-to-last thing I remember about Guilin is fetching my bag from the hotel and badgering the rude manager to let me use the toilet before I left.  Basically I asked him if there was a bathroom I could use, and he said, no, and then I asked him over and over again until he relented and pointed me towards a public restroom on the second floor. As I came back down, he was getting chewed out by a father and daughter couple who were upset about getting ripped off. Fists were being pounded on the table as I left.  I hope the father and daughter won.

The last thing I remember about Guilin was that the wooden doors of the toilet stalls in the men’s room were covered with more graffiti than any surface I can recall encountering in China.  Truly impressive stuff. I took as many pictures as possible, but I am still trying to piece them back together into a unified whole.

New Article up on TLN

I had a new article go up on Tea Leaf Nation today.  This one is about using search engine Auto-complete to dig into stereotypes that Chinese people have about their own regions.  If that doesn’t make any sense, I’d suggest you have a look at the article, since the visuals really help to clear things up.

The article also got on Foreign Policy‘s website and got picked up a few other places too.  This was the first one that anyone at the office ever noticed and told me about. Gratifying!

Leaving work today, a new employee at the neighboring department introduced herself while on the elevator, and we got to chatting. She was very personable, but when I asked what part of China she was from, she assumed that I was too ignorant of the country beyond Shanghai for there to be any point in speaking of her hometown in anything but the vaguest terms (“You probably don’t know it, it’s on the coast.”). In all fairness it probably wasn’t a bad assumption on her part (many foreigners in Shanghai really are that incurious), but it was a bit ironic that I was getting that treatment at the same time as that map of what the Chinese Internet thinks of every province (including hers) was making the rounds online.  

First Reaction to Kunming Attacks: An Easy Target

Back in 2007, I took my visiting mother and aunt on a trip departing from Shanghai Railway Station. Joining a crowd of people streaming through station’s front entrance, we put our suitcases on a conveyor belt scanner and elbowed our way through a security checkpoint. Picking up my bag on the other end, I was greeted with an image of the uniformed woman manning the scanner sprawled out asleep in her chair, hat covering her face as image after X-Rayed image of luggage passed by the screen, unnoticed by anyone. 

Tasked as I was with the safety of elder relatives unfamiliar with China, I immediately felt a twinge of panic, and the image of the sleeping security agent seared itself into my mind.  In the ensuing years traveling solo, I have watched for the attentiveness of scanner staff in stations around China, including in Kunming. Sometimes their eyes are locked on the screen, but in others they chat with friends, or are engaged with pressing matters on their mobile phones:

 

The scanner incidents are just a symbol of the overall lax security in Chinese train stations, where guards are vastly outnumbered by teeming masses of passengers rolling and hoisting suitcases, crowding around gates is common, and which can seem like controlled chaos at the best of times.  Station concourses and the plazas around them are known throughout China as dens of pickpocketing and other petty crimes. Such experiences have led me to half-joke, half-worry to friends that China’s train stations would make wonderful targets if terrorist organizations ever turned their focus to the nation’s populous interior.  Those concerns turned out to be ruefully prescient on Saturday, when ten or more black-clad attackers armed with knives stormed the train station in Yunnan’s provincial capital of Kunming, slaying more than thirty. 

The latest reports indicate the Kunming attackers targeted the station’s ticket sales hall, which per the standard of Chinese station design is sectioned off from the scanner and security-cordoned waiting and boarding area.  People queue before and occasionally crowd around a row of bank teller-esque glass windows, behind which sales staff take money and print tickets.  In some halls travelers will sit in groups on their luggage or newspapers, eating snacks or playing cards. Sometimes it can be hard to find an authority figure of any kind, leaving passengers with urgent questions to force their way to the head of a line to talk to sales staff.  The halls are an especially ripe target for armed men and women looking to kill as many as possible.

My roommate is a native of Yunnan and former resident of Kunming; having passed through the station countless times and with friends and family frequently traveling in the area, he has been incensed both by the brazenness of the attackers and the failings of the security apparatus.  In particular he feels that older rail stations like Kunming’s have been left behind as the government puts all its effort into the new high-speed rail system.  Gleaming new stations like Shanghai’s Hongqiao Transportation Hub are outfitted with high-tech bells and whistles, modern amenities, and greater security to boot.  Meanwhile the older generation of conventional rail stations in the nation’s interior is left to fester, with their riders bearing the heaviest costs. These are not the upwardly mobile air passengers or riders of the coast’s pricey bullet trains, but migrant workers lugging their belongings in cheap nylon bags into aging standing-room only passenger cars, among other have-nots.  They wait for hours in poorly lit, often dirty station environments that crawl with unsavory characters and suffer from insufficient seating, filthy bathrooms, poor shops and amenities, and a skeleton staff of both service personnel and – as we have just seen – security guards.  My roommate feels the stations and their passengers have been abandoned by a government enraptured by its new toys, leaving them easy prey for violent extremists who believe massacring the weakest elements of society will somehow further their cause.

Some say that extremist elements of Xinjiang have adopted a new strategy of striking out at targets beyond their homeland, seeking to incite terror among the most vulnerable elements of a populace that had thought itself insulated from chaos in China’s border areas. If that is true, then many other spaces where safety has been taken for granted suddenly look vulnerable.  My mind immediately goes to the Shanghai subway, where twice a day thousands of commuters – myself included – breeze by yet more bag scanners, ignoring the plaintive bleatings of teenage guards to submit to a security check, confident that it is an absurd formality for which we are all too busy to make time.  After Kunming, I might start wishing they got a bit stricter.