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| 24 Hours in Sim City |
| Channel 4 film illuminates life in Chongqing |
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Asad Yawar (AlexYawar)  |
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Published 2006-04-12 11:10 (KST) |
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As a teenager I became a late convert to that famed simulation of enlightened megalomania, Sim City. For those of you who are not familiar with this (some would say morbidly) engrossing computer game, the scenario is simple: you have been elected mayor of a city, and you have to build up its infrastructure -- power lines, transportation networks, schools, parks -- from scratch, whilst keeping an iron grip on the budget and brokering deals with everyone from neighboring cities to the national government in order to attract investment.
My initial efforts were dismal. Instead of constructing an urban paradise, I ended up being responsible for a city where there were more potholes than tarmac, troubling differences in the quality of public amenities, and a garbage problem of such proportions that at times the streets resembled a grid of rubbish.
However, after raiding the local Sim City guru for advice ("rein back spending on everything but health and education," for anyone who is currently playing), I found that I could create metropoles with glittering public transportation systems, A-grade schools, boundless verdant parkland, and a seductively cool nightlife. Indeed, these cities were so pleasant that at times I would have seriously considered moving to them had they actually existed.
After seeing "Megalopolis," Jonathan Watts's superb short film on Chongqing (screened recently on British network Channel 4 and currently available for free download from The Guardian newspaper's website[MP4] as an Apple QuickTime movie, it is clear that the Chinese megalopolis combines elements of my early and later Sim Cities.
 |  | |  The new centre of the universe: Chongqing's World Trade Centre | | | ©2006 Wikipedia | The background to the movie is this: Chongqing, a city in Western China that most people in the Western world have never heard of, is now the world's biggest municipality, with over 31 million residents -- more than the populations of Iraq, Peru, or Malaysia. The heart of the Chinese administration's "Go West" policy to develop impoverished western China, Chongqing expands by 137,000 sq meters of new floor space every day. The city's per capita income has shot up by 66 percent in the past five years to £731 (US$1,280) per year.
But as "Megalopolis" illustrates, this awesome super-settlement is a place of starkly contrasting fortunes. At the crack of dawn, we are invited into the life of Yu Lebo, a door-to-door distributor, or so-called "bangbang" man. The "bangbang" is the bamboo pole on which Yu balances goods that are at least as heavy as his own body. On a good day, he will earn twenty pence (35¢) for one hour's work. A former agricultural worker, he has come to Chongqing to earn money to put his children through school -- something that the state no longer provides for free in communist China.
On the building sites on Chongqing's city limits, we meet a number of laborers -- like Yu, all migrants from the countryside -- who are relentlessly erecting skyscrapers. One of them, twenty-five year old Chen Li, has been working on Chongqing's sites for nine years. He optimistically expresses that "the buildings are getting better and taller". Analogously, an office tower window-cleaner who goes by the nickname of "Spiderman," Li Zhiguan, says that the pace of change in Chongqing's skyline is such that he notices differences in the space of a week.
As the day progresses, we climb the social scale. Watts takes us to view a new car factory built by industrialist Yin Mingshan. As Watts notes in his accompanying article on Chongqing, "Invisible City," Yin was a political prisoner in the Mao era; he now presides over a business empire with 9,000 employees and a turnover of £521m. ($912m.) From this perspective, it is difficult to disagree with his statement that "China is a country in which you can make your dreams come true."
Following a visit to a garbage dump and then a brief detour with police officer Lai Hansong, who proffers Watts some official and unconvincing statistics about crime, the neon heartlands of Chongqing are viewed. In an upmarket restaurant, some local intellectuals muse about the challenges -- environmental, social and economic -- that are facing their city, concluding that the problems of Chongqing are the problems of every conurbation in China.
 | | | | Chongqing's burgeoning nightlife | | | ©2006 Wikipedia | The film ends in a hot nightspot, Falling, where German techno and French hip-hop serenade the young and the rich of Chongqing. The cover charge for a single table in this club is over £50 ($88) -- more than Yu Lebo earns in one month. Outside, some new migrants, dressed very stylishly in clothes so cheap that they appear that they will fall apart at any moment, explain their disappointment at the fact that they cannot even get jobs as "bangbang" men. Other migrants, many of them children, take to the streets as prostitutes, flower-sellers, and buskers.
There is no doubt that Chongqing has many of the features of the kind that only a very advanced player of Sim City will ever encounter: sophisticated fast food restaurants, flashy boutiques and astonishingly capacious physical infrastructure (when Watts shot his film, the municipality was busy completing the construction of eight motorways, eight railway lines and eight bridges). It even boasts a squad of police girls on rollerblades, who patrol a pedestrianized center that is vaguely reminiscent of that featured in the hit film "Shaolin Soccer."
Yet as "Megalopolis" brings home, Chongqing also possesses all the problems of a city of a thousand industrial plagues: horrendous air pollution, responsible for countless premature deaths; undrinkable water; huge economic insecurity; and aesthetic impoverishment. It is a metropolis that is almost completely disconnected from nature, and until this is remedied, Chongqing will remain what it is today: a mere econometric entity, a conurbation that is merely imitative of a city; a Sim City, if you will.
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©2006 OhmyNews
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