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Suburbs of Shanghai

By juliareinholdgw

Shanghai, like many Chinese cities, is known for its skyscraper forests and busy downtowns. In the United States, we usually think that a city is composed of the downtown area and suburbs. China does not have what we would usually consider “suburbs”. As China underwent its rapid developmental race, people rushed to live downtown in the big cities. Huge apartment buildings were constructed to hold the increasing population of the east coast. Yet in this rush to put up some of the tallest buildings in the world, Chinese cities never developed a gradual transition from city to rural area. The “suburb” is not a concept in China the way it is in the US.

Chinese people don’t live in single houses on cute little streets with green lawns and flowers. They live in multi-level apartment buildings that exist even miles away from the downtown areas of a city. This weekend, I took a trip to one of the suburbs in the outskirts of Shanghai in order to see a Confucius temple. Despite the fact the air was cleaner and the leaves a brighter shade of green, it did not feel like I had travelled 30 miles outside of Shanghai’s city center.

Jiading District suburban is giant. It spans almost the entire northeast corner of Shanghai. To get there, you have to take an hour and a half journey to the end of subway line 11. There you will find Jiading Old Town, a touristy ancient relic with a Confucian temple situated within. Like many of the Yangzte River Delta old towns, Jading’s streets are interwoven with multiple canals. Despite the tourist attractions though, Jiading was an interesting sample of Chinese suburbs. There was a mall, many trees, and multi-leveled apartment buildings. There were cafes and restaurants lining the streets. Yet only a short distance away there were shack houses and rice fields. The entire distance between downtown Shanghai and this touristy, cute suburb is as so. In its haste to keep the economy running, the Chinese government builds giant apartment complexes right next to rural farming communities. The contrast is unbelievable. Peasants will be farming in the rice fields next to huge soccer mom vans parked under apartments with modern facilities. This strange juxtaposition really encapsulates China’s huge, and ever growing, income gap.  In addition, many of the apartment buildings recently set up in the outskirts of Shanghai are empty – “Ghost Towns” as they are known. Ghost Towns are becoming a huge problem in Chinese metropolitan areas as the supply of housing severely exceeds the demand. It’s not that there aren’t enough people to fill up these apartments – China has plenty of people, it’s that no one wants to live in areas that do not have a good school. In China, a child’s success is reflective of their parents and a majority of that success is determined by success sin school. As a result, there is a huge demand for housing in downtown areas and small pockets of the metropolitan area with good schools – like the Jiading Old Town area, and this demand drives housing prices way up. However, between these pockets, there is virtually a wasteland of ghost towns and struggling farms hoping to keep up harvest in a polluted environment.

Chinese suburbs are an interesting phenomenon. Families rarely seek a quiet, calm, and nature-filled environment for their children to grow up in – instead they pick the atmosphere that will most likely give their child a chance to succeed. Jiading District is a prime example of an area in China that contains multiple contrasts and highlights the huge problems present in Chinese society that have resulted from the country’s rapid economic growth. While Fudan Unveristy and most of the activities I undertake keep me in the downtown, developed areas, it is nice to sometimes get out into what I call “real China” to see how the rest of the country, outside China’s billionaires, live.