Arrival City: The Final Migration and Our Next World

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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 grand...