Made in China: Exposés Of an American Expat

If you saw the recent 2009 documentary Home, a film about the ecological destruction of earth at the hands of Homo sapiens featuring spectacular aerial footage of our planet's recent rapid demise hammered home with a gritty, doomsday script narrated by acclaimed actress Glenn Close, you might remember her brief voice over (along with some short clips of skyscrapers) about the booming Chinese city of Shenzhen:

Faster and faster, in the last 60 years, the earth's population has almost tripled, and over 2 billion people have moved to the cities. Faster and faster, Shenzhen in China, with its hundreds of skyscrapers and millions of inhabitants, was just a small fishing village barely 40 years ago.

I moved to Shenzhen from Bangkok, Thailand barely two years ago, but the changes I've witnessed in that blink-of-an-eye time span are as frightening and eye-opening as the telltale documentary by Yann Arthus-Bertrand. Shenzhen is like a ticking time bomb of human modernization. Shenzhen is a city popping at the seams with congestion, pollution, and many other waste products of overbuilding, overdeveloping, and overpopulating. Yet, for so many citizens of the People's Republic of China, Shenzhen is a city to be proud of, a modern metropolis of advanced technology, engineering, and design viewed as a crowning achievement in the rapid growth and development of the world's rising new superpower.

Like so many of man's blind technological and architectural advancements, Shenzhen looks much better from the outside. In the few quick cuts of Shenzhen's booming skyline in Home, for instance, the city appears as a shining example of stunning architecture, a picture postcard of towering steel, iron, and glass showcasing one of China's fast-growing contemporary cityscapes as a beacon of economic opportunity and prosperity.

And therein lies the rub. Not everyone in Shenzhen is getting rich. In truth, only a small percentage of people living here, including politically-connected government bureaucrats and law enforcement officials, entrepreneurs, and other privileged fat cats, are making business, real estate, and development deals of a lifetime.

Those at the top of the food chain are raking in big money and becoming filthy rich. Those at the bottom, migrant workers from the farms and fields of China's vast rural wastelands, are barely scraping by, living in crowded factory dormitories and earning an average of $130 per month. Those in between, white-collar professionals including engineers and accountants, are living more comfortably but less lavishly in China's booming economy.

I, too, came to Shenzhen for work. My job is teaching English as a foreign language, or EFL, to Chinese students. Unlike most of the Chinese people who move here, I came for a better job but not necessarily a better way of life. When I arrived in late August, 2007 what I found was a sprawling, booming city of 10 million laid out into five large districts of flat, hot, humid, and nondescript farmland bordering the New Territories of Kong Kong. What I found was a metropolis filled with millions of poor people struggling to strike it rich.

Though crowded, the city also has an alluring and hospitable side, with just the right amount of flashing neon and enchanting facades to give it the thrilling pulse beat of big city life, a sense that anything is possible within the magical glow and synergy of its thriving city centers. At night, Shenzhen appears larger than life; by day the hustling and bustling city seems oddly out of place with itself, as though the frenetic construction of new high-rise apartments and skyscrapers and shopping malls and parks and tree-lined boulevards are constantly out gunned by the dirty and dilapidated original infrastructure of a humble Chinese fishing village turned megalopolis just four decades in the making.

Despite all of the good reasons for Shenzhen's accelerated growth -- better jobs and lifestyles, more money and amenities -- the majority of its inhabitants are being left behind. Far behind. As the city grows, so does the cost of living. At certain times of the day many of the plush, upscale shopping malls can look like ghost towns. Only the rich can play there. Window shopping in the glamorous worlds of high fashion is a favorite pastime for many students and middle-income workers who dream of a better life.

What is Shenzhen? A city of hopes and dreams for millions of diligent and industrious Chinese men and women with families who live and work and strive for their share of the world's finer creature comforts? Or is it a city of despair and nightmares for millions of migrant workers who sweat and toil for meager wages while the rich go shopping and dining at playing and living in the luxurious and fabulous showrooms of 21st century opulence?

My life is somewhere in between. My wife and I enjoy a simple lifestyle. I earn enough money to live frugally but comfortably in a Chinese urban jungle of expanding concrete, steel, and glass. We live in a modest and poorly furnished one-bedroom apartment overlooking a tranquil park on the campus of the polytechnic institute where I teach English to freshmen students preparing to study at colleges and universities in Australia. I like my job. I also teach part-time at an internationally-known hotel. My students are mostly young, ambitious, and highly interested in the Western way of life. They want the goods, the best products and services, that their super-rich, superpower of a country has to offer.

What does the future have in store for them? Will there be enough raw materials, clean and unspoiled water and soil and air and space for them to thrive? Or will they barely have the chance to survive? How long can their country's accelerated development continue before there's nothing left, before the poor begin to perish and the rich hang on for dear life?

Already, I've seen changes in the wrong direction. Still, if rapid growth is what brought me here, who am I to say when and where it should stop? After just two years of living here I see more cars, more buses, more traffic, more people, more foreigners, more commuters, more smog, more pollution, more high rises, and more skyscrapers than ever before. When will it stop? Unfortunately, as one documentary about the history of mankind's high-tech industrial revolution predicts, probably not until it's too late.

But life in Shenzhen goes on. The city is expanding its subway system, the Shenzhen Metro, as it prepares to host the 2011 World Universidad, an international sporting event featuring university students from around the globe. There are stadiums and gymnasiums and swimming pools to be built, and China has plenty of migrant laborers to build them. As the gap between rich and poor continues to widen, at least there will be work.

More foreigners will be arriving and working, too. Expatriates like me looking for better jobs and, on the really good days, perhaps even a better way of life.

Next Up: Shenzhen's Free Trade Zone: what it means and what it represents to the working class citizens of one of China's fastest growing cities.