Chinese Whispers: life in a mega-city

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4.4 • 785 Ratings

🗓️ 20 September 2022

⏱️ 37 minutes

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Summary

In the last four decades, hundreds of millions of Chinese have moved into cities. Today, two thirds of the country live in urban areas (compared to just one third in 1985), and many of these are hubs with tens of millions of people – mega-cities that many in the West have never heard of before.

What does this fast urbanisation do to communities and tradition? On this episode, Cindy Yu's guest Austin Williams (an architect turned journalist and academic) explains how these populations were thrown up into 'vertical living'. ‘If Ayn Rand had created a country, then China would be it’, says Austin. In other words, the family unit matters more than the community surrounding you.

This episode is a deep dive into urban life in China. Austin and Cindy discuss the residential compounds that we in the West have seen so much of through reporting of China's lockdowns; the demolitions required to pave the way for this wave of urbanisation, which, sadly, left some towns disembowelled without rebuilding (see Austin's film Edge Town about one such settlement outside the city of Suzhou); and they debate whether it's a good thing that traditional Chinese aesthetics are returning to the country's modern architecture.

If you enjoy this podcast, you can now register your interest for an upcoming Chinese Whispers newsletter, at www.spectator.co.uk/whispers.

Transcript

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0:00.0	The Spectator magazine combines incisive political analysis with books and arts reviews of unrivaled authority. Absolutely free. Go to spectator.com.uk forward slash voucher.
0:31.5	Hello and welcome to Chinese Whispers with me, Cindy Yu. Every episode, I'll be talking to
0:36.4	journalists, experts and long-time China
0:38.3	watchers about the latest in Chinese politics, society and more. There'll be a smattering
0:43.5	of history to catch you up on the background knowledge and some context as well. How do the
0:47.9	Chinese see these issues? In the last four decades, hundreds of millions of Chinese have
0:53.5	moved into cities. Today, two-thirds of the country live in cities, compared to just one-third in 1985, and many of these are urban centres with tens of millions of people, mega-cities that many in the West have never even heard of. On this episode, I'd like to take a look at urban life in China. So news to so much of the population.
1:12.2	I'm joined by Austin Williams, who is an architect turned journalist, and author of two books on Chinese architecture.
1:18.0	What is life like for people living in these dense city centres?
1:22.1	Will they prefer closer relationship with nature?
1:24.5	And what about the housing slump discussed so recently on this podcast
1:27.7	and its impact on urban communities? Austin, welcome to Chinese whispers. So Austin, to start with,
1:35.0	I'd like to paint a picture for listeners of what life is like in these urban areas. It's also
1:40.4	partly because that's what I know best, because I was born in Nanjing, which is a city of nine
1:44.1	million people, a tier two city in the Chinese communist tiering system. So can we start by
1:49.7	looking at how they live? So the accommodation, the residential compounds, the shall chue of Chinese
1:55.9	cities. I think they'll be quite alien to Brits who are used to living maybe in semi-detached houses or terrorist housing or cold attacks, that kind of stuff.
2:04.9	So can you explain what is a small, what is a residential compound?
2:08.0	Well, just to say, I think it's similar in some respects to walled communities in the UK, but different.
2:15.6	So they're not necessarily posh and affluent.
2:18.1	They're normally kind of fairly bog standard and even house migrant workers.
2:21.5	But effectively, they are walled encampments, which basically in the old days used to be
	...

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