China and me

I’m sitting in front of a photograph which shouted China to me before I even looked at the caption.  It’s not the Great Wall or people doing tai chi in a public park, not a Terracotta Warrior or the Water Cube, not the exuberant skyline of Pudong which has sprung from nothing since the 1990’s to be Shanghai’s financial and commercial centre.

What I’m looking at is a close-up of a block of flats and it was The Independent’s picture of the day recently.  It’s a close-up in the sense that you can’t see the ground, the top or either side of the block.  You can clearly see clothes drying at the windows.  Nevertheless, it is distant enough to see 12 floors and probably six apartments on each floor.


China has housed the vast majority of rural migrants to the big cities in high rise flats, the older ones faced with ceramic tiles and the newer ones simply painted like the one in my picture.  We would find them tiny and cramped but in the country which has had a population density higher than Europe’s for centuries, they are homes.

Having done business in China I went on holiday there a few years ago and I realised that I found it far more interesting to go for work than for tourism, to wander round a modern residential area rather than a traditional hutong and to poke round a shoe factory rather than a gallery.

Historic China is interesting and illuminates its present but it is modern China which is exciting.  It’s the most dynamic, extraordinary place.  Brutal and tough in many ways too but fascinating.  This picture transported me to a Chinese city in an instant and I want to go there again soon.  I want to go to the west and see the development in the inland cities.  I want to see again some of the extraordinary geology I glimpsed in the coal-mining area of Shanxi.  I want to go to Chongqing, one of the dirtiest cities in the world because exciting things are happening there.

I also want to go to Suzhou again and do something other than get lost repeatedly on the ring road before finally finding the right factory.  Suzhou is on the list for ancient culture as well as modernity: I’m not a complete Philistine.  The Chinese say that just as there is paradise in heaven, so on earth there are Suzhou and Hangzhou but all I’ve seen of them is a ring road and a factory.

There are three odd things about my picture.  The first is that I can only see one person in all these flats.  The second is that there is so little colour here.  There are a few red curtains but the picture is almost monochrome.  The third odd thing is that the picture is used by The Independent with a caption about the growth of the world’s population which they forecast could grow to 15 billion by 2100.  Perhaps so but Shanghai is hardly an apt illustration.  A high population certainly (23 million the paper suggests) and high density too but China’s population is not forecast to grow much further.  It is expected to peak at about 1.4 billion before 2030 because of the long-term effects of the one-child policy.

I think they can squeeze me in too: when I look at the picture now pinned to the wall above my desk, I feel the stirrings of a need for a little Chinese adventure.

About the Author: Elizabeth Parkin
Elizabeth had a 25 year career in management before joining the University seven years ago as Manager for “Pod” Programmes. She also held the post of MBA Academic Director before moving on to becoming Head of Department for Management and Business Systems.