The "Wishful" Preservationists and the Villagers Who've Had Enough: Should This 500-Year-Old Village in the Heart of Shenzhen Be Torn Down?

It is a witness to history, part of the city's working machinery, and an unwanted slum.

Yang Qian, a Tianjin native who has lived in Shenzhen since 1993, always introduces the city to friends by comparing two places: the first McDonald's in mainland China, which opened on Dongmen Old Street, and Hubei Village, less than a kilometer from the old Dongmen shopping district — because "put the two side by side and you can see the whole span of Shenzhen's history."

That span is roughly 500 years, which is also how long Hubei Village has stood. Yet for all its billing as a "cultural relic," Hubei Village is in practice nothing more than an "urban village." Urbanization swallowed the old village and ringed it with high-rises. The houses fell into disrepair, the rents stayed cheap, and most new migrants with nothing to their names made the place their first foothold in the city, while the original residents moved out as soon as they could. Its history long ago became too tangled to sum up in a sentence.

Shenzhen once had many urban villages. According to figures from Yang Xiaochun, head of the urban planning department at Shenzhen University's School of Architecture and Urban Planning, the city had about 1,200 old villages in 1992. After Deng Xiaoping's "southern tour" made Shenzhen a pilot city for reform, that number fell to 200 by 2012, and three years after that, in 2015, only 150 old villages still kept their traditional character.

A book called No Urban Villages in the Future: The Myth of Wealth Created Through Demolition in a Pioneer City (《未来没有城中村：一座先锋城市的拆迁造富神话》) recorded how fast the urban villages vanished: from 2006 to 2010, Shenzhen used three methods — "tearing down and starting over, partial renovation, and comprehensive management" — with the aim of "thoroughly killing off these bad organisms," trying to "put a perfect full stop on Shenzhen's urbanization."

In 1992, Old Hubei Village, in Luohu's central business district, was brought into the district's old-village renovation program, but it was large and involved so many people that for a while no suitable developer could be found.

In 2011, the state-owned China Resources Land signed an agreement with the Luohu government to turn the whole Hubei area into "an integrated entertainment center combining shopping, offices, a hotel, a park and apartments." At a vote the following year, more than 97 percent of the shareholders of Hubei Industrial Co., Ltd. — that is, the villagers themselves — approved the plan.

This was how Yang Qian came to be involved with Hubei Village. The project formally launched in May 2016, and the "Expert Review Meeting on the Urban Renewal Plan for the Hubei Area" that Luohu District convened soon after set off a storm: because the area set aside to preserve the old village came to only about 6,000 square meters, less than a tenth of the old village's total, most of the experts present voted the plan down.

The story quickly drew heavy coverage from Shenzhen Commercial Daily and other outlets. As wave after wave of public opinion called for protecting old-village culture, several academicians, Wu Liangyong among them, wrote to Ma Xingrui, secretary of the Shenzhen Municipal Party Committee, demanding that Old Hubei Village be kept. After touring the old village on June 28, Ma called for an outcome in which preservation and redevelopment both won.

In early July, figures from Shenzhen's arts, social-research and planning-and-architecture circles, Yang Qian among them, jointly launched the "Hubei Old Village 120 Urban Public Program" and issued the "Hubei Consensus," calling for the old village to be preserved. Tumu Zaisheng, a local Shenzhen NGO concerned with urban planning and construction, launched a campaign called "Please Keep Hubei's Door Open," providing an information-sharing platform and support for research teams from inside and outside Shenzhen looking into the redevelopment.

Relocation was put on hold, and Hubei Village landed in an awkward position: "can't be redeveloped, can't not be redeveloped, and can't even be discussed." From the point of view of anyone involved — government, developer, preservationists, residents — Hubei Village had become a knot no one could untie.

Unsafe Houses

Hubei Village is old enough that you can tell from the houses themselves.

Many of them are so low and so worn that the shops and towers along the street swallow them. Only by walking the roads at the village's edge and watching for the narrow gaps squeezed between storefronts can you catch sight of the village behind them.

Step in through one of those side paths, past the seafood stalls, restaurants and shops built up around the edge, and you feel you have travelled back in time. The village is divided into four quarters — east, west, south and north — over roughly 78,000 square meters. The east, west and north quarters are mostly "handshake buildings," six or seven stories tall, added later. The south quarter is the oldest: its houses are only one or two stories, mostly tile-roofed brick-and-timber structures built in the late Qing. In the 1990s many south-quarter residents had already moved abroad and so could not rush to pile on extra floors the way their neighbors did, which is why most of the old houses there survive as they were.

Preserved, the place might have kept a certain romance. But in 1999 the Shenzhen municipal government issued a rule barring residents from renovating urban-village houses on their own: any work now needed approval first. That stopped the extra floors, and it also took away people's right to repair their own homes. As Zhang Weiliang, a 72-year-old Hubei villager, put it: "We can't touch it ourselves, so all we can do is leave it there and rent it out. If the house comes down one day and someone gets hurt — the government hasn't thought about any of that."

Zhang Weiliang helped compile Hubei Village's local history. He also supports demolition.

"Our place really is falling apart. The lanes are narrow, the houses are wrecks. It's mostly people from Chaoshan living there now. If you asked us to move back in, we couldn't take it — a lot of the houses don't even have windows. How would you live there?"

As the villagers grew richer through the 1980s and '90s, Zhang says, they first built New Hubei Village, then moved on into better-equipped commercial housing. He rents out his own two rooms in Hubei Village — just over 20 square meters between them — for 400 yuan a month each, and worries constantly about the state they are in.

In 2003 a serious fire broke out in a rented house in the south quarter, killing an eight-year-old girl. In 2011 another big fire hit the south quarter, killing two people and injuring one.

"Everyone will agree to tearing down the south quarter," Zhang Weiliang said. "As long as the villagers get housing in return either way. Preservation is fine too — it would let our descendants see what the old village looked like. Tear it down and rebuild it, keep something that looks like the old village, just get the compensation right."

Mr. Fang came from Chaoshan in the early 2000s to make his way in Shenzhen and now runs a small shop in Old Hubei Village. Business is flat; he never made the breakthrough he once expected. After all these years, he jokes, he no longer sees much appeal in life away from home, and if the houses come down he may go straight back to his hometown. "In Shenzhen, without a hukou, getting your kids into school is a hassle, and the cost of living is high."

Preservation

Yang Qian is a freelance artist who wears several hats: artistic director of Shenzhen's Fat Bird Theatre, a teacher of visual creativity and art history at Shenzhen University's School of Architecture, and Hubei Village's most active preservationist.

He knows exactly how villagers like Zhang Weiliang think. "Villagers and tenants are bound to think differently from us. Looking at it historically, once you stop letting villagers build their own ecosystem, all they can do is put up the resources they have and gamble on the future — trade it away."

Yang Qian blames the present mess on the government: first it did nothing about basic infrastructure, then it forbade people to repair their houses. And yet, run-down as Hubei Village is, he believes the place holds a value that cannot be erased — the very value the developer, the government and the residents have all failed to see.

"Urban villages are the most basic springboard for anyone trying to get a foothold in the city. There's no barrier to entry, and they sit in economically prosperous areas, which naturally helps people trying to establish themselves in Shenzhen. What makes Shenzhen most attractive is that it gives people a chance, and urban villages give that chance somewhere to happen. In Beijing everyone has to live out past the fifth or sixth ring road; taking part in the city costs you something. But this pattern of urban villages in Shenzhen actually helps the city prosper and grow. It's diversity, not uniformity, and that helps a city enormously. It's like plants — where mixed scrub grows thick, the ecosystem tends to be healthier, because some kind of balance has been struck."

Yang Qian and the other preservationists treat Hubei Village as a symbol, a way of asking what an "urban village" is for and how it might fit a modern city's growth. In other words, they want the urban village redeveloped too. They just don't want this plan.

In July 2016, Luohu District held another expert symposium and said it would "preserve Old Hubei Village over a larger area." In August, the Shenzhen office of Huayang International Design Group, the firm designing the Hubei project, put forward a new plan: about 12,300 square meters of the old village would be preserved, roughly 10,000 of them on site and about 2,300 rebuilt in the original style, with the grid of three north-south and eight east-west lanes retained.

In the latest plan, issued in February 2017, the area to be kept in Old Hubei Village was provisionally set at 10,350 square meters; buildings outside it would be demolished and rebuilt. In the redevelopment blueprint included in The History of Hubei Village (《湖贝村村史》), more towers rise around the surviving old buildings, and Luohu Culture Park, next to the old village, becomes a high-end commercial complex with a roof garden. The whole area would look different.

Third-party pressure seemed to be moving things along, but Yang Qian says this is not what they were after: a plan like this merely admits the romance of Hubei Village's 500 years while erasing what an "urban village" does — the convenience it gives the tenants who live inside it.

Wan Yan, a researcher at Tumu Zaisheng, thinks much the same. Redeveloping an urban village, she says, should "keep the social ecosystem and not let rents go upmarket." An urban village's "ecosystem is rich" — seafood markets, small businesses of every kind — and replanning the area will destroy it, so the same patch of land will hold far fewer people.

"It used to hold 60,000 people; after the plan it can only hold 10,000. The other 50,000 may be pushed out of the urban village to places with higher rents, and some, unable to afford the cost of living, may move even farther out or leave Shenzhen altogether." The end result, as Wan Yan sees it, is that "Shenzhen's growth becomes unsustainable, living costs go up, companies' labor costs go up too — it's a problem for the whole economic system."

"Shenzhen's most expensive property, OCT, is one wall away from Baishizhou. Take the old high-tech district — Dachong was right there, and Dachong has been demolished. If Baishizhou goes too, the Hi-Tech Industrial Park is finished, because labor costs will have to rise," Yang Qian said.

To Yang Qian and the others, the village's 500-odd years of history "happen to give everyone a chance to sit down and talk this through": Hubei will not be wiped out as fast and as thoughtlessly as other urban villages. The question worth asking now is this — if a space like this can survive Shenzhen's headlong urbanization, "can we turn that into a kind of value, so that any urban village that can be kept, we find a way to keep."

"Shenzhen's economic miracle isn't only a matter of history and policy. It also has to do with this kind of urban ecosystem. Shenzhen may be the only city with almost no barriers for migrants. Its classes haven't hardened, and it still leaves room for people to rise and fall," Yang Qian said.

Dialogue

Hubei Village explains why Shenzhen is called Shenzhen.

According to The History of Hubei Village, today's Dongmen Old Street belonged to Hubei Village throughout the Ming, Qing and Republican eras. To make it easier to trade goods between villages, people set up stalls on open farmland between Hubei Village, Nantang Village and Xinwu Village, and a small market — a "xu" — gradually grew there. Because a fairly deep ditch ran along the west side of the market, and a ditch is also called a "zhen," people named the place "Shenzhen Xu."

Shenzhen Xu was centered on what is now Jiefang Road, with four gates, east, west, south and north. Commerce was most developed at the east gate, Dongmen, and most people shopped there, so "Dongmen" came to stand for Shenzhen Xu itself.

Dongmen Commercial Street has nearly 300 years of history, and the only physical evidence of it left standing is the tile-roofed houses of Old Hubei Village. As a surviving urban village or as a piece of historical preservation, Hubei is representative either way.

Yet in this argument over Hubei's redevelopment, the tenants who live in the village now and hope to make it the starting point for their dreams in this city were left out from the beginning. Yang Qian, Wan Yan and the others are pushing hard to use Hubei to change how the government and the developer think, to make them value again the labor that drives the city's growth. But even the tenants themselves have never really thought about these questions that keep going round.

Most of the tenants in Hubei Village come from the Chaoshan region and run businesses of every kind in and around the village. Five or six in the morning is the busiest hour for the seafood sellers, who shuttle between the trucks bringing seafood in and the Dongmen Seafood Market on one side of the village; the foam boxes and plastic crates leak fishy seawater along the way and coat the road with it. At any hour of the day you will run into the workers pushing handcarts of goods through the streets and alleys. The lanes are so narrow that usually only one person fits, so if you spot a delivery worker at the far end of one, you may have to take another route.

At night, following the bright lights through the dim lanes, you come out on a food street. Lufeng salt tea, Chaoshan clay-pot congee, fruit salad, roast meats, marinated meats, hot-pot skewers and every kind of seafood. Crowds press around the stalls, and wherever a corner offers a little more room it is filled with tables and chairs where strangers sit side by side over their food.

When he isn't working, Yang Qian is forever heading into the urban villages, walking friends around, occasionally "barging" into people's homes out of curiosity, and settling in at a food stall for a drink in the evening. But over the whole campaign to save Hubei Village, he has talked with the people who live there very little.

"The professional world doesn't express itself well enough — everything comes out in professional language. Second, they haven't the energy to translate it, or to keep the conversation going over the long term. I think that's a big problem," Shijie, a staff member at the NGO Tumu Zaisheng, told QDaily.

He added: "But I can't assume their conclusions are wrong."

Liu Qianyun, a graduate student in urban planning at the University of Amsterdam, is an unusual sort of observer of the Hubei project: she came here specifically to study what third parties did in the redevelopment fight.

She thinks the project was bound to fail from the start. "Scholars and experts don't live there day to day — honestly, they're not stakeholders. So when they say it should be preserved, their stake in it has nothing much to do with the place. If the villagers had come out on their own and said they wanted it preserved, this project would look very different."

"Everyone is weighing their own interests. For the government, it's a record of achievement. For China Resources, it's a flagship project bearing the company's name, and it helps the company's future too. Third parties raised their views, and everyone looked at them from the standpoint of their own interests and asked whether the view might benefit them — so whatever consensus was reached came out of everyone deciding it suited them. That's how we got the present outcome," Liu Qianyun told QDaily.

When Yang Qian, having got no useful answer from the government, carried a stack of documents to the petitions bureau to file a complaint, the reply matched Liu Qianyun's description exactly: the official there was astonished, saying it was the "first time we've met someone petitioning not for his own interest but for the public interest," and in the end gave him an answer that amounted to passing the buck.

As for the villagers, the people the old-village redevelopment touches most directly, Zhang Weiliang calls them "the most practical of all — they only talk about their own interests." The biggest trouble the project is likely to hit later on is still the "nail households" who dig in over the size of their compensation.

In late April 2017, China Resources Land marked out the first phase of redevelopment around Luohu Culture Park, near the old village, and walled off the plots to be rebuilt with construction barriers. The barriers carry photographs of laughing men, women and children of every age, beside slogans such as "Hubei's redevelopment is what the people want, the trend of mainstream opinion" and "Today's old Shenzhen district, tomorrow's happy new Hubei." A notice reading "Park Redevelopment" went up on the park's iron gate.

When the news reached the WeChat group of nearly 500 people who follow Hubei's redevelopment, almost no one replied. This third-party group, once locked in constant argument, has now, as Wan Yan sees it, "sunk into exhaustion."

They look somewhat powerless against the situation as it stands. "We've said everything there is to say, we've done everything there is to do. They don't listen, and there's nothing we can do about it," Wan Yan said.

Tumu Zaisheng has moved on to new projects, and the Hubei 120 official account has not posted since March 24. Yang Qian says that if the "decent people" he met through the Hubei affair "want to do something more" later on, he will help, "but I don't want to start anything myself again."

He does not deny that what he did was worth doing. "I think the Hubei 120 business may mean something to people in other cities — someone in Beijing might say, 'We envy you, at least you can speak up,' and the government won't come down and crush it right away. But how big a problem it can actually solve, we don't know. In terms of the result, is there any difference between being strangled and being slowly suffocated? I think that in Chinese cities, especially first-tier cities, this was the first time public attitudes toward urban renewal came to the fore — not just as a technical supplement, but as a supplement of values. That's where the significance of the Hubei affair lies. It isn't a question of which side is good and which is bad, but of how we as a whole look at this space called a city, and what kind of city we want — and this voice isn't fragmented, it's systematic and researched."

For Zhang Weiliang and the other villagers, what lies ahead is a long wait. He reckons the whole project, to be built in three phases, will take about a decade. At the current compensation ratios — 2.5 units for every unit of tile-roofed housing in the south quarter, one for one on other old housing — plus the upgrading of the property around them, prices could reach 70,000 or 80,000 yuan per square meter, which would make every villager in Hubei a potential multimillionaire.

As for what finally happens to the tile-roofed houses that are kept, nobody yet knows.

Cover image from luoohu and tuchong; in-text images, unless otherwise noted, were taken on site by the reporter.