• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1573 0

also by the constant linkages it makes, from every street and every house and every workplace, in two directions. It is linked in a lasting and intensive way to its originating villages, constantly sending people and money and knowledge back and forth, making possible the next wave of migrations from the village, facilitating within the village the care of older generations and the education of younger ones, financing the improvement of the village. And it is linked in important and deeply engaged ways to the established city. Its political institutions, business relationships, social networks, and transactions are all footholds intended to give new village arrivals a purchase, however fragile, on the edge of the larger society, and to give them a place to push themselves, and their children, further into the center, into acceptability, into connectedness. Liu Gong Li makes many things, sells many things, and houses many people, but all with one overarching goal, one project that unites its mad range of activities. Liu Gong Li is an arrival city. Here, on the periphery, is the new center of the world.

At the crest of the valley, a short, steep walk up the curved gravel road from the factory-packed valley floor, is an especially dense conglomeration of concrete buildings. If you enter an alley behind a small restaurant, then cut through a labyrinth of tunnels and narrow passageways surrounded by high walls, you will reach a small gray courtyard. It is a tranquil spot amid the chaos of the slum, with low wooden stools surrounding a small table. The air is filled with the pungent smells of Sichuan cooking and the remote sounds of motors, babies crying, shouted commands, horns. Crouched near the table is an old man, dressed in the traditional green cloth jacket and beaten canvas shoes of a peasant, and a Nike baseball cap. Beside him is a conical bamboo hat filled with herbs he has gathered on a walk in a little-known green patch at the far end of the valley, behind the five-story garbage mountain that covers most of the old glade.

This is Xu Qin Quan, the cure-gatherer and village patriarch, still living in exactly the same spot at the center of Liu Gong Li. The shift to urban life has made him a wealthy man: from his rental earnings he has housed most of his family members in condominium apartments costing $75,000 each, or 10 years’ earnings for a manager. He alone stays here, close to his medicinal trove. The “village” is still owned collectively by its original residents, and it is still legally a village. This means that none of the hundreds of dwellings here, other than this one, fully belong to their owners, even though many have purchased title deeds from the collective and buy and sell their houses for profit. The thriving property market has driven rents and unofficial land prices upward, giving the village-migrant “owners” a source of capital through rent, sublease, and property speculation—none of it official or taxed—which they often use to launch businesses. At any moment, the city authorities could bulldoze the whole district and either throw all 120,000 residents out or move them into apartment blocks with clean, official garment factories next door. China has done this to hundreds of such neighborhoods, disrupting the lives and economic relationships of families that have invested everything in this urban foothold. Liu Gong Li’s founders are confident that they have at least a decade before this happens.

Officials from the Chongqing People’s Congress tell me vaguely that they someday want to turn their entire megalopolis into a place without shantytown settlements, replacing them with neat workers’ dormitories and private apartments built around industrial centers. But they also tell me that they want to urbanize as fast as possible, at a rate of growth that cannot possibly be absorbed without an exponential increase in these high-density, informal settlements. There may be several thousand housing towers under construction around Chongqing on any given day (all by private companies), but the budget for