Apologies for the lateness of this post, I was out of town and didn’t have net access.
Friday morning I managed to pull myself out of bed around 7:30. I stumbled my way to the dining hall, eager for some steamed buns and a heaping bowl of boil-them-yourself noodles and broth. As I slurped up my breakfast and sipped my leafy tea I wondered what exactly a trip to Dian Lake and the new Yunnan Campus would entail. The significance of the lake was lost in the barrage of information I’d received in the past seven days but I was looking forward to getting out of town and seeing a bit more than the blocks surrounding Yunnan University.
We miraculously were all able to get on the bus on time and soon we were on our way to Dian Lake. The weather was quite overcast but I for one was glad when we pulled over by the side of the lake and were invited to take a walk. It’d been a while since I’d been able to walk around such a spacious, not-so urban area (I’d spent the past week on crowded flight from New York City to Shanghai and then a packed train car to Kunming, which may be a smaller city in Chinese terms but it’s still a bustling metropolis) and the lapping of the water mixed combined with the serene Sleeping Beauty was calming. This portion of the lake had undergone a massive cleaning overhaul but the section we were about to visit was still highly polluted.
Teams of workers in orange vests could be seen on rafts as we rolled past the lake. The massive project they were undertaking was made clear by Ruyong when he explained that the water was so dirty that it could not even be used for industrial purposes. While this fact was jaw dropping, the portion of the day that left the largest mark on me was the drive back to the city.
The fact that China’s urban migration is of an unprecedented size is well known (a figure I read recently claimed that a decade of rural to urban migration in China has eclipsed the entirety of Irish immigration to the USA and the number continues to rise) but until you see the dozens upon dozens of high rises being built around the outside of the city and recognize that it is just a single Chinese city among hundreds, the reality of the situation is impossible to grasp. Furthermore, after seeing the While giving me a much clearer sense of the scale of China’s urbanization situation, the skeletal frames of the high rises, the unfinished freeways leading toward them before ending abruptly and the cranes dotting the landscape created many more questions. With Dian Lake still on my mind, I wondered about the environmental effects of such development. I also found myself wondering who exactly was going to be living in such complexes and what sort of work would they be doing? As we entered the city proper I became more aware of the work occurring within the city as well. What I took for renovation was in fact construction and reconstruction. All of this lead me to wonder what the Kunming represented to the its long term residents and how that differed from how it is being understood in the state development projects that view it as the gateway to the markets of South and South East Asia.