Urban Inequality in Chengdu

People go to Paris to see what is there, but also what is not there. Haussmann’s boulevards, the Louvre’s glass pyramid, and the spires of Notre Dame would not amount to much if they had to compete with modern skyscrapers. While most cities grapple with slums and industrial sprawl, Paris has also had to sweep another problem under the rug: how to build without demolishing.
Just a few miles to the west of Paris is a forest of glass and steel called La Défense, a business district that does not look all that different from its counterparts in Barcelona or Vancouver or Kuala Lumpur. Masterminded in the 1950s and ’60s, this “edge city” has ensured Paris’ relevance in the global economy, but not without costs. Like many other development projects, the process displaced residents, razed homes, and colonized farmland without creating many viable new living spaces. Today, the city empties out after five o’clock, with its few residents living in little pockets of subsidized housing among all the skyscrapers. The district’s master planner told the New York Times, “La Défense is like an iceberg that is disconnected from the areas around it.”
Some five thousand miles away, the southern Chinese city of Chengdu is about to do what Paris did 50 years ago. But while La Défense spans around five square miles, Chengdu’s new Tianfu district will cover over 12 times that area, with plans to then triple in size by the year 2030. When finished, Tianfu will include wide boulevards and sprawling plazas, high-rises and high-tech development zones, eco-friendly transport networks, and a contemporary art center by Zaha Hadid.
Just this summer, the world’s biggest stand-alone building, New Century City Global Center, opened its doors in Chengdu. A town in its own right, the Global Center could easily swallow 30 Yankee Stadiums. It boasts a university campus, a high-end hotel, 4.3 million square feet of shopping, and a massive artificial beach overlooked by a 490-foot-long LCD screen projecting Caribbean sunsets. If that sounds excessive, that is because it probably is. In China’s wild west, city officials dream big.
Build It and They Will Come
The Olympics were held in Beijing, the World Expo in Shanghai, and the Asian Games in Guangzhou. All along China’s coast, the glitter of skyscrapers and sprawl of factories tells a story of both newfound wealth and lingering poverty. The west remains a relative backwater, with its wide swaths of farmland and uncultivated marshes. But Huang Xinchu, party secretary of the city, notes that economic growth in China’s west has actually outperformed the east for the last five years. Fortune magazine declared the Chengdu Model, which preserves cultural ties while developing an ambitious Tianfu edge city, as the key to China’s future. It wasn’t just empty praise: this year’s Fortune Global Forum was held in Chengdu.
Will Chengdu really become a hub for global commerce, or will the bubble eventually burst and turn the city into a debt disaster? As farmers become laborers for public projects like 
the Global Center, the land they leave behind will be taken in
 by the government and sold off for the city’s expansion. The congestion and constant construction within city limits will test how much faith Chengdu residents have in their city’s motto: “Today’s trouble for tomorrow’s convenience.” And beneath these changes, there are the twin issues of inequality and corruption. Chengdu’s success will depend as much on its sources of investment as the ability of its government to manage public opinion. The Tianfu district promises to transform Chengdu into a world-class metropolis, but the story of La Défense gives us a glimpse of how this transformation could come at the expense of the average citizen.
Rising Tide of Inequality
Studies of inequality in American cities tend to focus on how wealth gaps affect crime rates, high school dropout rates, or voting behavior. When social scientists turn to China, however, their main concern is political instability. Does rising inequality lead to greater discontent with the state? Could the next Tiananmen Square be triggered by the growing ranks of rural migrant workers, who do not receive the same social services as city dwellers?
China’s 2012 Gini coefficient was 0.474, approaching the level of Brazil and Nigeria, two of the most unequal societies in the world. The gap between urban and rural income levels, which were 3:1 before the economic reforms of the 1970s and ’80s, has now risen to 4:1. The hukou system, which prevents those living in rural areas from moving freely to the cities, ties peasants to the land and denies them easy access to employment in the cities. A 2004 national survey found that 50.9 percent of respondents thought that social inequalities persist because the rich and powerful wanted them there, and a similar number of Chinese believed that economic inequality links directly to political instability.
Of course, these facts tell only part of the story. For a country as large and diverse as China, national data can only give us a snapshot of conditions on the ground. A country with extreme levels of inequality across all regions, for example, would worry about instability differently than one with relatively equal communities, but extreme wealth differences from region to region. China, though, has aspects of both. The link between inequality and instability becomes more complicated when we consider why protests happen in China in the first place.
Harvard sociology professor Martin Whyte distinguishes between two types of injustice: distributive and procedural. Distributive injustice refers to inequalities in wealth or income, the type of tension that arises from seeing wealthy neighbors driving Maseratis, for example. Procedural injustice, on the other hand, refers to corruption, nepotism, or a rigged court system, the type of complaint that might be lodged against a government official who used welfare funds for said Maserati.
When Whyte’s team teased apart these two types of injustices in the survey data, they found that most Chinese were unhappy about procedural injustices, not distributive ones. The average Chinese citizen might not blame the state for the spectacular wealth of his neighbor, but he will blame the state if he believes it is carrying out its policies unfairly. Even the 2008 global economic meltdown did not change attitudes all that much. “Conspicuous consumption in China has a long tradition,” Whyte told the HPR. “But pollution, chemical plants, and land expropriation for the development of cities are new sources of discontent. People feel that the authorities are not doing their jobs properly, but if they voice their concerns, they could get in worse trouble.”
Digger Huang and Demolisher Li
There is a reason why the nickname “Digger Huang” is censored out of Chinese social media. Aside from Chengdu Party Secretary Huang Xinchu’s unpopular projects to build metro lines and elevated highways in downtown Chengdu all at once, he also cracked down with surprising ruthlessness on a factory protest earlier this year. With billions of yuan cycling through these projects each month, Chengdu residents find it hard to believe that Huang is not linked to the corruption scandals that have rocked the city over the past year.
Last December, Chengdu’s former deputy mayor Li Chuncheng, nicknamed “Demolisher Li,” was expelled from
the party for his under-the-table dealings with real estate giant Vanke. Legal Weekly estimates that he raked in billions of yuan by massaging land rights auctions, and that he should even be held responsible for the death of 47-year-old Tang Fuzhen, who set herself on fire when a demolition crew attempted to bulldoze her home.
And this month, the Global Center itself came under scrutiny. Deng Hong, the billionaire who helped fund the world’s largest building has disappeared and is likely in police custody. “There are more investigations, and more arrests, to come,” a state newspaper editor told the Telegraph. Over 50 government officials have been detained. If the 50 billion yuan used to fund the Global Center were tainted by corruption, then Chengdu Party Secretary “Digger Huang” may also be implicated.
“The very system that drives development in China creates men like Li Chuncheng and Deng Hong: powerful, supremely wealthy, and until very recently, unaccountable to anyone,” Chengdu Living’s Sasha Mutascak writes. In this way, the dangerous side of rapid growth is not so much a widening wealth gap, but rather widening inequalities in power. With the fall of key players, developers could pull their plans, property prices could fall, and public opinion could become public dissent. Residents may criticize “Digger Huang” and “Demolisher Li” for their vast wealth, but if we take Whyte’s findings to heart, it’s the injustices that destabilize a regime, not the inequalities.
Remembering Mao
From a distance, mass rallies and mass demonstrations can look remarkably alike. Rallies during the Cultural Revolution would feature rows of Mao portraits, raised like sacred picket signs in Tiananmen Square. Mao would seem rather misplaced at a modern-day protest, but his image appears with surprising regularity. “Chairman Mao, we are missing you very much,” read a sign at a 2012 Beijing protest. In a nation whose Marxist fervor had faded with the death of its Chairman and with the economic reforms that followed, the people’s renewed fondness for Mao is not only perplexing, but perhaps also a little threatening. “It’s a way of critiquing some of the features of the current era,” Whyte explains. “While I think there are very few people who would go back to the years under Mao, there is still the idea that the rules were clearer and simpler, and the people had higher moral standards back then.”
With full sensitivity to the famine, stagnation, and political persecution that plagued those years, it may be worth thinking about how much China has changed, and how much it hasn’t. For Mao, a new nation could only be built by digging up and demolishing old habits. For the leaders of Chengdu, a new global economy can only be built by displacing traditional labor and demolishing old neighborhoods. Yet the more they excavate, the more they find remnants of Mao’s old power inequalities within themselves, buried somewhere between those concrete pillars and LCD sunsets and wild west dreams.
Image credit: Flickr / Jakob Montrasio