This is China! BLOG

I Dig Suzhou

A couple days ago while walking to work in the Suzhou Industrial Park I counted ten dump trucks clustered round a city corner, waiting to go to work. Beside the groaning behemoths filled with pasty concrete was the high pre-fabricated wall of what will be a combination residential high-rise/office building/Marriot hotel. Within a one kilometer radius of my office building on Su Hua Lu, next door to the humpback International Building – where the SIP government administration resided until about two years ago – I counted five new construction sites that have gone up within the last year.

One of the projects is a great glass-and-steel structure that looks like a pair of cowboy pants, bowed at the knees, presumably with fly open for a piss into Lake Jinji, at which banks it sits. It’s height supposedly will rival that of the twin towers in Kuala Lampur. One of the charms of Suzhou has been its lack of skyscrapers. Hope Big Pants sinks into the marshy shore of Lake JinJi to be discovered centuries later by a disgusted Charlton Heston after the apes have taken over the Earth (for you Planet of the Apes aficionados out there).

And then there is the new subway system going into underground Suzhou. The entire east-west axis from SIP in the east to Suzhou New District to the west – another economic development zone in Suzhou –has been dug up. Traffic in the downtown area along this 1200 year-old route is a mess all hours of the day. The central canal that lends such charm to the downtown area has been excavated, and tall white-and-blue walls separate the construction work from the work of just getting about one’s daily existence. Talk is that phase 1 of the subway project – including the north-south axis – will be complete in 2013. Of course, the road along which I walk on my way to work each morning, and back again in the early evening, is bisected by this open wound.

I often tell clients that are visiting China that China is building entirely new cities from scratch. And it’s all happening simultaneously: residences, businesses, restaurants, KTV establishments, night clubs. All at the same time. Blink: a new block of buildings. Blink again: a new high rise. Blink Blink Blink: a whole new city. Of course, I also tell them that the United States government is still unsure of where to start in the reconstruction of New Orleans. One can be sure that by the time New Orleans has been rebuilt that China will have built at least twenty new cities, each of which can hold several hundred thousand people, AND have reconstructed the earthquake battered regions of Sichuan province.

In the past eight months in particular in SIP, any patch of green that had survived for years as pruned gardening or ‘green space’ has been grabbed up and great digging machines put to use to scrape away at the soft land and ram up another paean to Chinese modernization with Singaporean characteristics. Within five years the area around JinJi Lake will be unrecognizable.

Indeed, SIP itself will be transformed from a premiere manufacturing base to a modern services economy replete with high rises and high costs. Indeed, eventually, the Suzhou subway system will connect with the Shanghai subway system to create a massive public transportation system that crosses provinces. As a friend in Shanghai noted to me just a few days before, “Suzhou will become a suburb of Shanghai.”

Wonder what the weather’s like in Anhui province’s Anqing?