Wang Lin needed a change. The crushing air pollution and gridlock traffic in his hometown Hangu, an industrial district in China’s northern metropolis of Tianjin, made him anxious and sometimes sick.
Then he heard about the Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-city. According to its marketing, the US$40 billion development — a joint venture between the governments of China and Singapore — will one day be a “model for sustainable development” only 40km from Tianjin’s city center and 150km from central Beijing. To Wang, it sounded like paradise.
Last year, the 36-year-old moved into an inexpensive apartment in one of the city’s half-occupied apartment blocks. As a freelance translator, he does not mind that most viable employers are at least half an hour away by car. He loves the relatively clean air and the personal space, but he also has his complaints.
By the time the city is complete — probably by 2020 — it should accommodate 350,000 people over 30 square kilometers. Five years into the project, however, only about 3 km2 have been completed, housing 6,000 permanent residents. There are no hospitals or shopping malls. Its empty highways traverse a landscape of vacant mid-rises and dusty construction yards.
“This place is like a child — it’s in a development phase,” Wang says. “But it’s chasing an ideal. It’s the kind of place where people can come to pursue their dreams.”
Last month, China announced its new urbanization plan, a massive feat of technical and social engineering which will move more than 100 million country-dwellers into cities over the next six years. The question is how. China’s current development model has proved environmentally disastrous; ghost cities and towns have triggered fears of an impending real estate meltdown.
Chinese authorities began encouraging the construction of “eco-cities” in the middle of the last decade. Since then, hundreds have sprouted across the country. While the concept is vaguely defined, most eco-cities are built on once-polluted or non-arable land, comply with stringent green architectural standards, and experiment with progressive urban planning and transportation infrastructure. The catch is that they simply might not work — if, indeed, they get finished at all.
According to Neville Mars, a Shanghai-based architect who is writing a book about eco-cities, Tianjin has an advantage because of its proximity to a major metropolis and shipping hub: “It’s already proving to be successful, because it’s still building.”
Many other ambitious eco-city projects — including Hebei Province’s Caofeidian, once considered the crown jewel of the movement — have ground to a halt. The problem, says Mars, is the “new city model” — the goal of building a whole city from the ground up rather than letting it develop organically.
“You can want to design your urban landscape, but in reality, on a fundamental level, that’s impossible,” he said. “We have to acknowledge that it’s extremely hard to build a regular city from scratch.”
Furthermore, some experts say that certified green buildings and pedestrian-friendly roads are a worthless patch for China’s environmental woes, not a solution.
“Chinese people use a lot of coal because it’s very cheap,” says Tao Ran, acting director of the Brookings-Tsinghua Center for Public Policy. “If coal doesn’t become much more expensive, then enterprises won’t use more green energy.”
At present, the Tianjin Eco-city feels more like a simulacrum of a viable community than the real thing. Its buildings are designed to the world’s most stringent environmental standards, but they stand mostly unused.
“The idea is to ensure that what we build here is commercially viable,” says Ho Tong Yen, chief executive of the city’s master developer. “It should not be an expensive project funded mainly through government subsidies.”
Over the past year, he says the project has made strides, selling about 400 housing units a month — a rate which Ho describes as “healthy.” Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) visited in May last year. In January, the city’s developers presented to the UN in New York.
“If you ask me what is most unique about Tianjin Eco-city,” Ho adds, “it is the comprehensiveness with which we are tackling the question of sustainability in the development of a city.”
On an official city tour, assistant public relations manager Gang Wei walks through a sparkling — yet unoccupied — glass-and-steel office building, enumerating its environmental advantages. Nearly a third of its energy comes from turbines and solar panels, he says; its stairs wind up through the center of the building, encouraging occupants to shun the elevator.
Yet while the developer claims that more than 1,000 companies have registered in the city, many storefronts on its main shopping plaza stand empty. Two frozen escalators lead to a mostly-vacant upper floor. In the middle of the afternoon its few occupants — a noodle joint, a coffee shop and a Japanese restaurant advertising “suisi” — are padlocked. Although the city’s first food market opened last November, it is still limited to a few well-stocked produce stalls. The massive space echoes like a gymnasium.
At one of the city’s three schools, the red-brick Ivy Mi Kindergarten and Primary School, office manager Xu Wenjiao stands in a sun-drenched front lobby more befitting a wealthy tech startup than an educational institution. Xu says that tuition costs only about US$65 a month, compared with more than twice that in central Tianjin. “It’s to encourage people to move here,” she says. “Investors want homes occupied.”
Xu strides through pristine hallways, opening doors to a music room, a spacious kitchen, a library furnished with beanbag chairs and potted plants.
“This is our garden,” she says, pointing out of a window at the school’s backyard — a small brick terrace dotted with dry plots of brown earth.
Behind the garden is a low wall, plastered with English phrases like “the seeds of fresh life, new bungalow” and “fresh air, bright sunshine, broad view, free breath.” Beyond that, a construction yard stretches into the distance. The air reverberates with the thwacking sound of a pile driver.
It is a familiar sound in Tianjin. With support from the central Chinese authorities, the municipality has shaped its outlying areas into an endless sprawl of showcase projects. Beyond the eco-city lies an ersatz ancient town, a free-market zone with its own soccer team, and a half-built financial center which, according to its developers, will someday rival Manhattan. Construction is everywhere; people are scarce.
Xu turns around and opens a door into a classroom, where brightly dressed elementary-school children are busy finger-painting, reading books and building block castles.
“Notice that they’re all doing their own activities,” she says. “We know it’s best to let every child develop in her own way.”
In Tianjin Eco-city, the future is a blank slate.
Congressman Mike Gallagher (R-WI) and Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL) led a bipartisan delegation to Taiwan in late February. During their various meetings with Taiwan’s leaders, this delegation never missed an opportunity to emphasize the strength of their cross-party consensus on issues relating to Taiwan and China. Gallagher and Krishnamoorthi are leaders of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party. Their instruction upon taking the reins of the committee was to preserve China issues as a last bastion of bipartisanship in an otherwise deeply divided Washington. They have largely upheld their pledge. But in doing so, they have performed the
It is well known that Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) ambition is to rejuvenate the Chinese nation by unification of Taiwan, either peacefully or by force. The peaceful option has virtually gone out of the window with the last presidential elections in Taiwan. Taiwanese, especially the youth, are resolved not to be part of China. With time, this resolve has grown politically stronger. It leaves China with reunification by force as the default option. Everyone tells me how and when mighty China would invade and overpower tiny Taiwan. However, I have rarely been told that Taiwan could be defended to
It should have been Maestro’s night. It is hard to envision a film more Oscar-friendly than Bradley Cooper’s exploration of the life and loves of famed conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein. It was a prestige biopic, a longtime route to acting trophies and more (see Darkest Hour, Lincoln, and Milk). The film was a music biopic, a subgenre with an even richer history of award-winning films such as Ray, Walk the Line and Bohemian Rhapsody. What is more, it was the passion project of cowriter, producer, director and actor Bradley Cooper. That is the kind of multitasking -for-his-art overachievement that Oscar
Chinese villages are being built in the disputed zone between Bhutan and China. Last month, Chinese settlers, holding photographs of Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), moved into their new homes on land that was not Xi’s to give. These residents are part of the Chinese government’s resettlement program, relocating Tibetan families into the territory China claims. China shares land borders with 15 countries and sea borders with eight, and is involved in many disputes. Land disputes include the ones with Bhutan (Doklam plateau), India (Arunachal Pradesh, Aksai Chin) and Nepal (near Dolakha and Solukhumbu districts). Maritime disputes in the South China