Chinese Cities are Huge, But What's it Like to Live There?

Fish, resident of the country for seven years, and visitor to 21 of its 22 provinces, offers his impression of life in Chinese cities and the historical roots of their modern development.

He credits the cause of their monolithic and virtually unlivable condition to the rebuilding of the country led by Mao Zedong and the communist party according to the principles of "a Soviet-era engineering textbook." According to Fish, Communist leaders "subscribed to the Soviet idea of what a city should be like: wide boulevards, oppressively squat, functional buildings, dormitory-style housing. Cities weren't conceived of as places to live, but as building blocks needed to build a strong and prosperous nation; in other words, they were constructed for the benefit of the party and the country, not the people."

"Yes," writes Fish, "China's cities are booming, but there's a depressing sameness to what you find in even the newest of new boomtowns... For all their economic success, China's cities, with their lack of civil society, apocalyptic air pollution, snarling traffic, and suffocating state bureaucracy, are still terrible places to live."

Not all is lost however, says Fish, Chinese cities are improving. Pockets of livability still exist in the areas that predate Communist Party control; "Chinese cities have little crime;" and "on the rare day when the sky is clear, you can even see the stars."

Thanks to Emily Williams