Opportunity? Atmosphere? Why Some People Would Rather Live in a Big City | QDaily Big Survey

We want to reopen an interesting and worthwhile question — why big cities pull people in — in a way that isn't so heavy going.

What Uber driver Wang Jun knows about cities comes partly from the nearly 2,000 passengers he has carried in Shanghai and Hangzhou over the past two years.

Most of it sounds like what everyone else says. In the car, people complain about every problem with city life: housing costs too much and keeps climbing, and the crush of people makes it harder to find a job, a school place, or a doctor. Wang Jun has also noticed that developer-built shopping districts and residential compounds decide where most of the foot traffic and most of the ride requests go — in other places you can wait a long time for a single fare. And although there is always someone to share a ride with, passengers rarely speak to each other and show little real cooperation about the ride itself, which can cost one of them a train.

These problems are plain enough, and they push people toward every version of "escape Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou." The media have run the same special features over and over in recent years, and the various "most livable city in China" lists have ridden the same wave. Those lists mostly score scenery, clean air and an unhurried pace, which explains why Beijing came last and Guangzhou second to last. Even architects have started to miss the past. They helped build these cities, and now they call themselves accomplices of "urbanization." At last year's Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture in Shenzhen and Hong Kong, Doreen Heng Liu, an architect and one of the chief curators, said she preferred the older, slower Guangzhou, whose way of living and way of treating people look rare and valuable now.

City planning probably did shape both of those things — how people relate to each other, and how fast they live. But nobody agrees on what it produced. On relationships, optimists see breadth and pessimists see shallowness. On pace, Wang Aren, a man in his early thirties we interviewed, said that in Beijing, so he could see more people, he bought a car and then an electric scooter as well, so he could keep moving when traffic stopped.

"People should pile in together. Only when you pile in do you get innovation, and possibility."

Wang Aren said.

How can people see the same city so differently?

One reason is that a complaint about urbanization usually carries a complaint about bad policy inside it. And policy can also get in the way of looking at the city itself again. In a recent Bloomberg report on the reversal of urban population flows, the outlet cited an April survey by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences: half of China's rural population does not want to move to a city. At the same time, the government is steering people away from the big cities by simplifying company registration, cutting taxes and making investment easier.

We would like to strip those distractions out. Put simply, we want to reopen an interesting and worthwhile question — why cities pull people in — in a way that isn't so heavy going.

First, at the end of September the QDaily Research Lab ran a survey asking what a city has to offer today before it counts as "livable." More than 16,000 people took part, probably our most popular survey yet. People are interested in the question, and they think it is still worth arguing about.

Which makes the other version of Wang Jun's story more useful. Without a new kind of work like Uber — which arrived along with the city's rising density, its demand for fast movement and its sharing-based way of dealing with strangers — Wang Jun says that at 37, looking for work again, he owned nothing and had no idea what to do.

When Uber came to China in 2014 it chose Shanghai first. Sam Gellman, its head of Asia-Pacific, told the press:

"The basic reason is that the demand and the number of users in Shanghai meant Uber should start there."

Sam Gellman, head of Asia-Pacific at Uber

Wang Jun is a Shanghai native, and he spotted the opening early. He drove half a year in Hangzhou and a year in Shanghai, each time when business was best and subsidies were highest. In his best month he made more than 20,000 yuan.

The opposite story about "opportunity" tends to happen to people who go home after years in a city. They find they "lack the social network needed to start a successful business back home," Bloomberg adds.

Over the past month we also interviewed 13 young people who live, or used to live, in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Hangzhou and Chengdu. Their experiences don't add up to the whole picture, but they are worth hearing. Other stories come from people we interviewed in various cities earlier, who have their own answers to the same question.

We think these answers are vivid and convincing. A man who started a youth space has spent 8 years in Wudaokou, the "center of the universe," and came to see this:

"Beijing — I found that underneath this dirty, polluted place to live, there is a lot of restless energy and culture, interesting things, and those are what I want more at this stage of my life."

Cheng Baozhong

A former magazine editor who often reported from smaller cities still remembers running along the beach in Xiamen at six in the morning. She thinks anyway:

"The media's distribution and the industry's resources are all in Beijing and Shanghai. You have no choice. That is the reality in front of you."

Shi Yuhan

A maker of experimental theater found more tolerant venues and audiences in the city, and his story bears out what Edward Glaeser wrote in Triumph of the City:

"New artistic movements almost always make their first splash on a stage, and only much later spread by electronic means."

Edward Glaeser

As long as a city hasn't grown too expensive, it is always willing to provide that stage.

Several young people looking for a partner said much the same thing: they believe the person they will end up with is more likely to turn up in a city.

These answers usually come back to density, and to what proximity makes reachable. It shows up as opportunity and as tolerance. That may sound abstract, so let us introduce the young people below, whose stories show what it means.

No one can change the smog. It just doesn't matter that much right now

Cheng Baozhong, a second-year graduate student, has been planning a video about Wudaokou, to work out what Wudaokou actually is.

A huge billboard beside the Wudaokou subway station reads "U-CENTER Wudaokou" — the U stands for "Universe" — so the neighborhood often gets called the center of the universe. The joke is only half a joke. Walk less than 10 minutes north from the station and you pass Beijing Language and Culture University, China University of Mining and Technology and Beijing Forestry University; 500 meters east is China University of Geosciences; walk south and the Chinese Academy of Sciences is on your right, Beihang University on your left. Ten minutes west gets you to Tsinghua Science Park, where Google, Microsoft and Sohu all sit, and less than 2 kilometers west is the east gate of Peking University. In between there are scruffy little shops, buskers, malatang and barbecue stalls — concentrated enough, and tangled enough.

Last year 73,779 foreign students arrived in Wudaokou to start a new life in a big city abroad. Set against the number of migrants Beijing takes in every year, that is still small. At the end of 2015 Beijing had 8.226 million long-term residents from elsewhere, 37.9% of its resident population.

For Cheng Baozhong, Wudaokou is more or less Beijing. Counting from the day he started at Tsinghua University in 2009, he has been in the city 8 years — 340 days a year in Beijing, 300 of them in Wudaokou. He feels about the neighborhood roughly as he feels about the city: at ease, and yet unable to "see it clearly."

When he graduated he wanted to go home. Beijing was just "a lot of people, bad air, no friends." Ask him now about going home and he says he doesn't dare think about it. The air hasn't improved, the line at the Wudaokou subway station is often long, but "I found that underneath this dirty, polluted place to live, there is a lot of restless energy and culture, interesting things," he says. "Those are what I want more at this stage of my life."

Beijing started to get interesting in 2012, when Cheng Baozhong and several classmates founded 706 Youth Space in Wudaokou. At first 706 was a handful of volunteers putting on regular talks and discussion sessions; then it began running cultural exchanges for young people, a coworking space, shared apartments and youth travel. The space now holds six events on a weekend, morning to night, drawing two or three hundred people. Cheng Baozhong and his partners have also rented seven apartments in a housing compound nearby, so people coming to Beijing for a short internship or job can make friends inside the 706 community quickly.

Last year the group registered a company. That suggests a lot of other people want the same thing — young people who dislike banquet networking and like plays and independent bookshops. "Our interests lined up, and so did our education and where we were in our careers." Every one of them had concluded that Beijing was the better choice, including in their private lives: five couples have met through 706 and married, one of them a same-sex couple.

Wang Aren thinks along similar lines. He works at a venture capital firm in Beijing, and because he believes "the value a person creates comes from how many people you work with every day, and I need to raise that number," he sees no point in grumbling about smog, the license-plate lottery or traffic. He also refuses to live in the suburbs. "In my job, I only get better deals and the best connections if I meet more people, and more founders, in less time than the next guy." To meet more of them he bought a car, and then an electric scooter as well, so he could keep moving when traffic stopped.

"The value a person creates comes from how many people you work with every day, and I need to raise that number."

Wang Aren

Glaeser made a similar point in a 2011 article in The Atlantic: dense cities are more productive than suburbs and offer more well-paid work. His other claim — that height, meaning tall buildings, is the best way to keep housing cheap and living standards high — is under strain. In China's big cities, housing is becoming unbearable.

Doug, who came from Washington, D.C., to work in China, ran into that wall. He moved to Shanghai for a job after graduating in June, and the hardest part was finding somewhere to live. On his first day he looked at 13 apartments, hoping to rent a studio of his own for 3,000 yuan; by that evening he had given up on the number. He ended up raising his budget to 4,000 yuan for a studio near Jing'an Temple, the most he could carry. He doesn't much like being on the ground floor: "Right outside my door is where everybody parks their bikes and scooters. It's loud, and every morning somebody sets off someone else's alarm. It drives me crazy."

What does excite Doug about Shanghai is the "atmosphere" he can feel in the air — the sense that everything is changing and that everyone he meets is trying something new:

"It's like walking into a room full of happy people, or sad people. The feeling is catching. You don't have to know them or know what they're going through, but the city gives you that sense that something is happening here."

Doug said

The Belgian writer Henri Pirenne called this the air of the city. In Medieval Cities he traces the rise of the European town, arguing that towns were a natural byproduct of trade and economic growth reaching a certain point: the burghers grew stronger, the nobility pulled back, and in the end —

"City air makes men free."

Henri Pirenne, Belgian writer

Working together as equals, and switching jobs without a second thought

Li Zheng, born in 1981, has worked in Beijing for 10 years and changed employers six times, the longest stint five years and the shortest under one. Back home in Baoding, relatives and friends judge a job by how close it is to home and whether the pay is about right, so "explaining a job change to them is always strange. 'Why do you want to leave? Isn't it a good job?'"

When she told them she had joined a startup that builds coworking spaces, they said, "So, interior decorating?" "I said no. Then he asked, is it real estate?"

Since the first coworking space opened in San Francisco, the idea has become one of the hottest of recent years. Forbes reports that there were just over 600 such spaces worldwide by 2010, and 7,000 this year.

It is plainly an idea that depends on cities. The word "coworking" comes from the notion of working together as equals. Compared with a finished commercial office project, a coworking space lets people from different backgrounds work side by side for a relatively low price per desk. It usually sits in the busiest commercial districts and close to a subway station, so members moving around the city can find a desk fast. That draws founders, freelancers and artists, who do more than work there: the spaces hold exhibitions, salons and talks, pulling creative and restless people together to share what they know and what they have, like a neighborhood. With luck, some of them turn out to sit upstream or downstream of each other, and the deals start there.

Li Zheng never expected to join a company like this, or to become a professional job-changer. Yet every move looks like the obvious next step: she pitched Tencent on behalf of a PR agency and Tencent hired her; at Tencent she got to know an angel investment firm and, on a friend's recommendation, passed its interview; at the investment firm she advised Dream Plus on marketing; and in the end she decided to do the job herself.

Most of all, she isn't worried that anyone in this city will hold the job-hopping against her.

Wang Aren's record looks much like hers.

When he arrived in Beijing alone in 2013, he had no bachelor's degree and no work experience. The first month broke him: "The city is too big. You don't know a soul and there is nowhere to start."

The old method, working your contacts, was useless. He read up on Zhihu and found his first job through Lagou and Boss Zhipin. The usual success rate on those platforms is 30%; his was probably under 10%. Without them it would have been close to zero. Zhihu's 2014 figures put Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou at the top for users; for Boss Zhipin the top three were Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen.

In all these years Wang Aren has never quit without something lined up. His last two jobs both came through friends he met at events run by youth platforms like Someet.

In his second year of work he moved into a bunk-bed share near Peking University and started sitting in on lectures. He was amazed the first time: in a philosophy class of 40 people, close to 10 had walked in off the street.

"You cannot have that experience in a small city. I talk about it now as if it were nothing, but at the time, sneaking into a class at Peking University, or seeing a play for the first time, knocked me flat."

Wang Aren

What I do has no commercial value, but in the city I can survive

Shi Yuhan is a former editor at the New First-Tier Cities Institute. The "new first-tier cities" she covers are the second- and third-tier cities, outside Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, that multinationals have warmed to in recent years. They earn the label because the material conditions of life there have mostly caught up with the top four — and once you take housing and transport out of the sum, spending can run higher there, with more room to grow. Suzhou, Chengdu, Nanjing, Xiamen and Zhuhai are usually on the list.

People who care most about comfort, who like an easy atmosphere and dislike competition and the upkeep of relationships, will naturally pick one of these cities. A survey Shi Yuhan ran on running found that Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou have the most running clubs but very few kilometers per person. In Kunming and Xiamen the reverse holds: few clubs, plenty of kilometers. Her reading is that people there don't run in order to socialize. It is simply how they live.

This young ex-editor is leaning toward that second life. She longs for Xiamen and Zhuhai, and won't rule out "getting a place in the countryside and growing a few flowers." In fact she is still in Shanghai, because "the media's distribution and the industry's resources are all in Beijing and Shanghai. You have no choice. That is the reality in front of you."

Zhang Yuan used to work at the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre. After a while he decided the plays there were too cautious to say anything direct about how people live now, so in 2010 he went to Japan by himself to study with a dance master, both how he worked and how he lived. He came back "full of energy."

With friends he once staged a piece called Passed Unanimously. The five of them boarded the train one stop before People's Square and took five seats together; when the announcement named People's Square as the next stop, all five broke into applause at once. Work like that has a small audience. It is neither a play nor a musical. "Nobody knows what you are. How is anyone supposed to sell a ticket?"

Luckily there was a small theater in the southwest corner of Shanghai, Xiahe Micang, that let Zhang Yuan and his friends rehearse for nothing. From the outside it was a dilapidated four-story warehouse; it took in mostly experimental work and opened its doors only to amateur companies. He rehearsed there for several years, until it closed in 2012.

A city holds enough of an audience to absorb the risk of an experiment. That the rising cost of the city is damaging that same experimenting is also beyond dispute. In Beijing, live houses have closed one after another, and the people who live off painting and performance have collected in Caochangdi, between the Fifth and Sixth Ring Roads. The split isn't always geographic: in Shanghai, young painters often rent the cramped top floor of an old timber house right in the center.

Just as Zhang Yuan was wondering what to do next, private art museums began multiplying in Shanghai. Unlike the big theaters, these new venues will take his kind of work, and they can do what a performance venue in a city is fundamentally for — "new artistic movements almost always make their first splash on a stage, and only much later spread by electronic means."

One piece he designed had a performer bare from the waist up with a large X painted across the chest; conventional theaters objected to unnecessary nudity. The private museums let him and other artists stay on for five to 10 days to experiment, and a publication of his own is coming soon.

Cities hold out more hidden trouble, and more kinds of happiness, which can leave you unsteady

Li Zheng's home city, Baoding, is only 100 kilometers of expressway from Beijing, and it feels far away. Most of her school friends there have bought one apartment and two cars, hold secure jobs and have children, and live small-city lives in the order everyone expects. They don't quite understand a woman still single at 35: "You work till 10 or 11 every night — busy with what? What is it you actually do?"

She is busy. She bought an apartment in Beijing and ran the entire renovation herself, better than plenty of men would have, she thinks. She has had long relationships, but after one ended she concluded that "the way I make my life count isn't marriage, or leaning on a man... Maybe I'm too independent. I can do a lot of things by myself. I even think I could have a child on my own, so why must I tie myself into a marriage?" She admires a pair of close friends, both contemporary artists, in their fifties and unmarried; their way of living, she thinks, makes fun of the whole institution.

A classic theory of cities says that a dense one makes it easier to find people like yourself: "a lopsided single population turns the city into a marriage market where a lifelong partner is easier to find."

Reality is more complicated. Along with more possible partners, cities hold out more hidden trouble and more kinds of happiness.

Which can leave you unsteady. Hu Die, 28, came to Shanghai two years ago and is still single. She reckons it takes at least six months of living together to know someone. She packs her weekends — exhibitions, cycling, skateboarding, lectures, photography, bookshops — and has since worked out that in this city meeting people costs almost nothing, while knowing one costs a great deal. Everybody is busy working and has no time for a relationship. "Apart from matchmaking, what is there? Or poking around on Tantan. Sometimes I find it pathetic."

Some people, though, know how to use the city's tolerance and its churn. Wang Aren met his boyfriend on the gay social app Blued; they have been together more than a year. He is open about being gay now, but back home in Shanxi he wouldn't dare. He knows the pressure and the rules of small-town life, and how careful you have to be not to become everyone's target.

Gay people are urban animals.

Wei Wei, associate professor at East China Normal University

Wei Wei is an associate professor in the School of Social Development at East China Normal University. Last year he published A Queer Reading of Chinese Society (《酷读中国社会》), which examines how cities, space and homosexuality fit together.

Gay people are urban animals, he argues, and only in urban space do they get real freedom. A city is heterogeneous, full of every sort of person, and the more heterogeneous a big city is, the more room it has for people at the margins and the easier it is to find your own kind. Gay quarters in the United States are ethnic quarters, like Chinatown, Little Italy or a Black neighborhood; they first formed in a forgotten corner of the city center, in what sociologists call the zone in transition — the same term usually applied to where new immigrants land.

They may yet live to see themselves become mainstream. Professor Wei knows a gay couple who sold a 100-square-meter apartment in Shanghai's Jiading District and moved into a 13-square-meter room near Xinhua Road in the center, because the suburbs were too far from the exhibitions, parties and events they wanted to attend. "Gay people don't raise children, so there's less of the daily household business, and that makes them all the more eager to pack into the center."

On weekends now Wang Aren and his boyfriend go to plays, play badminton, buy books. Buying an apartment isn't in the plan, but they aren't moving anywhere else, because "if I leave a place like this there is too little information reaching me, and that frightens me. I have to live in a big city to feel safe."

Everyone piles in, and hope collapses fast. But the next new thing still shows up here first

Uber driver Wang Jun doesn't look 40. His skin is dark and he is full of energy. Two years ago he lost money in business and went looking for a new opening, which turned out to be harder than he expected.

As we said at the start, the city didn't let him down. New work keeps appearing, and some of it comes without an age limit. He settled on driving for Uber because it took little money up front and paid reasonably well, and because he might pick up a boss who would hire him as a private driver. Wang Jun was among the first in Shanghai to try it. He had options: depending on how much they paid and how steadily, he could have gone with either of two rivals, Didi or Yidao.

Now, though, Wang Jun is thinking about a new job. After Spring Festival this year, drivers from outside Shanghai suddenly poured in, and car rental companies moved in to take a cut. They rent a car to a driver, who pays them 2,000 yuan a month; then the rental platforms added a 5% management fee and an insurance-like guarantee fund, meant to settle the regulatory question hanging over private-hire cars.

A week ago Wang Jun went to a gathering of the Uber drivers he knows. Some had bought cars when the market was good and are now pinned under monthly loan payments of 6,500 yuan; some had handed the car back to the rental company and stopped driving. It may have been their last gathering. They don't know Wang Jun's real name. They call him 6865, his license plate.

The city changes too fast, Wang Jun says now: everyone piles in within a short time, and hope can collapse just as fast. "You used to be able to slack off and still take home 7,000 to 8,000 a month. Now you work yourself to death for a bit over 4,000." He isn't sure what the next job will be.

With a skill to sell, Wang Jun might have handled the change more on his own terms. Shi Yuhan has just quit her job and plans to freelance for a while. Like coworking spaces, freelancers are appearing in cities in some number, on the belief that a city can supply enough work and enough room to rise, pay for its own high cost of living, and still be interesting to live in.

But in one way she is in the same position as Wang Jun: nobody knows when the next opening will appear. The only sure thing is that the next new thing will show up in a city first.

Cover images: wallnerock, wallpaperscraft, wikipedia

This article also drew on the city-themed reading list Zhao Yimin recommended to QDaily readers on October 3.