The City of Shantou

Shrimp farms along the shoreline.

Port facilities in Shantou--nothing compared to Hong Kong!

While old parts of town deteriorate, the new is being built. Real Estate leases on land are how those in power get rich--graft, etc.

This building still has the English sign: Post Office. It was the building out of which the British controlled all the trade.

(Above)
Across the water from the island where the foreign concession was located, a community developed that was Chinese but connected to trade and the foreign community. This are of the city remains as a major retail area, but continues to deteriorate. There is the same ambivalence as toward the colonial buildings. Note the art deco architecture from the 1930s--when it was at its height.

(Above) Remnants of British Government Buildings--ambivalence continues to keeps plans for their restoration from being carried out.

Shantou is a "smaller" Chinese city with about five million people. It is along the coast in coastal Eastern Guangdong province. At one time it was the third largest port--surpassed only by Shanghai and Hong Kong. This was because Shantou was one of the "treaty ports" established for Western trade. Shantou was thus a British outpost. The city did not really exist until the second group of British treaty ports was set up following the "Arrow War" in 1860. Foreigners built foreign sections on the edges of port cities--in Shantou this was on the island in the river near the coast--and established life there. In Shantou, as in other cases, the British actually controlled trade in terms of assessing tariffs, accounting, etc.

This history has left a great deal of ambivalence in terms of efforts to restore the western buildings left behind from this era. In the book, Prisoner of the State, about Zhao Ziyang who was a major leader up until the Tianamin Square uprising, you can read about the opening up of China in the 1980s and the great concern about Western control of any property because of the implication of sovereignty. This great anxiety goes back to the treaty port history where these concession areas and some ports were de facto sovereign territories of England, France, etc.

Shantou was also one of the original Special Economic Zones of the PRC, established in the 1980s. But it failed to thrive like the other zones did. The story I was told was that the area has such corruption that the money that came to the area was absorbed without anything productive being established. When someone from Beijing came to investigate, the building they were staying in was burned to the ground--they left but never returned and never sent more money. The strength of the underground economy--someone estimated about 80% of all income comes from this--is seen in the lack of ability of the Chinese government to enforce the One Child Policy in Shantou. It has never worked because penalties and losing jobs, etc. don't work when you depend on an underground economy rather than the government.

In the book Prisoner of the State, you also read about the era of the PRC where the government was obsessed with self-sufficiency and production rather than efficiency and trade. Progress was measured by the amount of production of particular things mandated by the state. It didn't matter whether there was demand for these products or whether they could be produced efficiently in a particular area--no taking of inputs into account in establishing production quotas and decisions. Shantou is a very unproductive area within this way of viewing the world--the land is not good. They could never meet the goals. It is a place that has always depended on trade rather than the production of some local product.

If Grand Rapids, Michigan has much travel between it and the Netherlands, and Minneapolis with Scandinavia, Shantou is a center of Chinese out-migration. These migrants have gone to Thailand, Cambodia, Singapore, Malaysia, and someone told me that many of the original Chinatowns in the U.S. were Shantou people. The person who told me this argued that if these Chinese immigrants had come from Northern China they might have assimilated rather than separated themselves. The Shantou diaspora continues to send money back to support local efforts and families.

Shantou has developed some toy manufacturing but also has big coal burning power plants.
And then there is the biggest electronic waste site on the earth...and high cancer rates. No wonder I came home not feeling particularly well...

And then there is the driving in Shantou--people driving down the wrong side of the road, pulling out in front of people, etc. A local says that this is where Shantou people express their freedom :)