I am now completely surrounded by construction pretty much all the time. There is a new building going up in front of my appartment, another one in between the academic building where I teach and the one where I have my office, another one near the basketball courts and the track, pluss a bunch outside campus. Needless to say, this is driving me completely insane and I don't think I'm the only one.
As you may know, I am sound sleeper and I deal relatively well with most types of noise. Mechanical noise, especially high-pitched mechanical noise is the exception. A few summers ago when I was living in Princeton, our neighbors across the street were remodeling and the noise had me constantly on edge. But at least they stopped working for the night. Becuase the construction firm here is under some time-restricted contract with the college, they work all night under spotlights. At first, it was actually the light that bothered me the most; that was until they started cutting rebar. I think the sound of steel sawing steel at four in the morning is enough to wake pretty much anyone up.
And of course the deep and restful sleep I have been getting is inevitably followed by the joy of teaching in some of the closest classrooms to the up-campus construction. As if this wasn't enough, the college felt the need to redo the windows on both my building and the one it faces so for a week I was followed by noise even when I was teaching on the side of the building furthest from the construction. The noise not only leaves me unrested and chippy but also means that I have to talk louder than normal, which is tiring and wears on my vocal cords, which are already somewhat tested by teaching enormous classes, which are distracted by the construction and make more noise of their own, which means that I have to talk louder than normal...The college has also decided to remove my primary means of escape: most of the fields around campus were either set on fire or turned over, presumably to make the grass grow back better this spring, but for the time being taking away my favorite reading spots.
However, the work on campus is far from the only thing that is insane about construction here. I have perhaps made brief mention of the way that the government effectively subsidises construction because they like the jobs that it provides. This has created some very strange places like the one behind the campus. This is a very extensive walled compound with a very paradoxical combination of features. It is centered around a lake which includes a beach and a very large development of what appear to be vacation homes. It is also home to several farms of a very traditional variety, some offices for the China-Australia University (which is also in Longhu), a training center for a bank, a school for judges (which does not appear to be in session? or I understood the characters wrong? something about judges and a school) and the office for a real estate company (presumably the one that developed this community, if it can be called that). Strangely, given the assortment of buildings, the guard at the gate is supposed to charge an entrance fee. But he didn't because his boss wasn't there.
It gets stranger. The vacation homes (if that is what they are) are a wide variety of pseudo-neo-classical houses about the same size as, say, those at the Jersey Shore. They seem to be what you would get if someone was shown pictures of vacation homes but had never actually been inside one. They are built entirely of cement with no brick, wood, shingles or anything else to be seen. There are several still under construction and it appears that the project is ongoing. The thing is, the ones that have been built are already falling into disrepair with peeling paint and rusting metal. And the insides have not been finished.
Curious to check on this hunch, I climbed in through the window of one and found nothing but cement floors (not even tile), radiators and trash. Nothing was painted; the stairs did not have a railing; there was no sign that any particular room was designated as a bathroom or a kitchen (i.e. plumbing). The trash is evidence that the workers lived in the house while they were building it, which is very common in China. The fact that it was well into disrepair with no attempt to finish the interior is evidence that the workers will probably be the only people to ever live in it.
This was not just one house, but dozens, probably hundreds of similar ones all along the shore of the lake. A community of unfinished, crumbling vacation homes with ongoing construction would be strange enough, but some of the houses (about four) showed evidence that their interiors had been finished and that people had moved in. I cannot imagine vacationing in such a strange and empty place. Or living there full-time. Around the grounds, workers continued to build houses and work on pseudo-European gardens. Theese too looked like someone had seen a picture of gardens in Europe but had never been to one, then made a half-assed and completely superficial attempt to recreate them. The streets were kept clean of trash by two older women that I passed and occasionally cars would go by on the streets, but the houses themselves were almost completely deserted.
When you place this in the context of China's need for space, its need for housing, it is depressing to think just how wastefull this whole thing is. I say thing because I am almost at a loss for words to describe the feeling of exploring this thicket of insanity. It felt strangely like post-appocolyptic survivors living in the decaying ruins of a misguided and unfinished utopia, groping to complete it but without an understanding of why or how. It felt like Animal Farm 2: Detente and Opening. And yet I am sure that this is not the only place in China like this.
As far as I can see, this is the result of the overpowering need to keep the population employed. As long as people are working, the party can hold power and enrich themselves. I've read a little about subsidies for construction, and quite honestly, some combination of these subsidies, graft, poor oversight, partial privitization and central planning are the causes of this insanity. Rich cadres taking bribes from rich developers buiding vacation homes for a theoretcial Communist leisure class that doesn't exist in quite the way it is imagined. All the while, money goes into this that could be going to health-care, education, better enforcement of regulations or hell, builing homes for middle class people. All of which are somewhat pressing needs in the China of today.
Just crazy.
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