This is a good article that was in the Observer the other day about Beijings transformation into something like Mega City One (or to be geeky(er) about it Sino-City One). The article is, in equal parts, frightening and awe inspiring (in the kind of Biblical sense). It paints the architects taking advantage of the city’s appetite for steel and concrete as egomaniac frontier capitalists using the government’s ability to demolish swathes of housing at will and draft in armies of impoverished workers to build their monuments.
Westerners such as the critic Ian Buruma question the propriety of designing a building that can be seen as endorsing the propaganda arm of a repressive state that tells a billion people what to think. It is criticism which Koolhaas dismisses with growing impatience. ‘Participation in China’s modernisation does not have a guaranteed outcome,’ he told one interviewer. ‘The future of China is the most compelling conundrum, its outcome affects all of us and a position of resistance seems somehow ornamental.’
The scale of the growth is pretty terrifying and Koolhaas is right that the future of China is a ‘compelling conundrum’, though that makes it sound like a tricky Advance Wars level rather than something to which all our fates are closely tied in a rather serious way. Basically if everyone in China starts to consume resources at the rate we do in the UK/US etc. we’re pretty much fucked, probably in a matter of hours*. Still the myths of capitalism, that the worlds resources are not finite and that economic growth will sort everything out, remain untouched. China’s ‘modernisation’ is viewed (with some concerns about fabric imports) as a triumph of the system. Surely part of the same short sightedness that means we still celebrate increased highstreet spending etc. as a sign that everything’s going OK with the economy, with no thought for the fact that really what it means is we’re moving increasingly quickly towards the point where we run out of stuff and the economy undergoes, euphemistically speaking, some fairly major adjustment. Happy Tuesday!
Also see : Jim’s post on the uneven distribution of China’s economic growth. And, this animation showing a massive ageing of China’s population over the next few decades is a surely cause for concern in a country with essentially no welfare provision.
*Not that I’ve done the maths or anything.
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