blogging urban change since 2005
Yesterday I went with friends to buy glasses at Luohu Commercial City. They don’t check for glaucoma, but the shops have machines that measure your prescription automatically (hum in hum out hum in again). The lenses are printed in half an hour (if they have supplies onsite), it takes 1.5 hours if they have to […]
I’ve been playing with Red Note and stumbled upon a map of Shenzhen that provides price per square meter by subway station. I’ve realized that (1) I live in the cheapest part of Futian and (2) it really is cheaper to live in parts of the city that have metro connections but no real social […]
Just a short post on the Chinese postal service, which was one of the most important infrastructures in early Shenzhen because it connected migrants in the city to their families back home. Not, however, because migrants were writing and receiving so many letters, but because the postal service remitted money back home. The postal bank […]
Originally a farmer, in Shenzhen CY worked in a kitchen at the Shangri-la Hotel in Xili and then went to eastern Huizhou to run a small, organic farm. Unfortunately, he couldn’t make a living as a farmer. Now he’s selling organic organic congee, buns, and medicinal teas. and sourcing his material through a network of […]
Short update on all the tech stuff I’ve encountered today. I had breakfast with friends who said that they were using AI to read and summarize books for them and that while an expert might do better, DeepSeek was faster and more accurate than a young, just hired employee. I then when to Handshake for […]
So, rumors before pictures. They say Lvgem 绿景 is bleeding. I’ve been told that the company can’t pay back the interest on its loans, let alone make a dent into the principal. Moreover, its become a problem because they are also unable to pay for the housing for the villagers who will move back 回迁 […]
So, I’m back in Shenzhen after a North Carolina interlude. What’s the first thing I did with friends? I learned how to use DeepSeek to tell my fortune. Turns out its a thing… The first things my friends gave me was the template (translated from the Chinese): My gender is X, my lunar calendar birthdate […]
Red tourism is a thing in China, especially visiting revolutionary sites — Yan’an’s 400+ sites (which have been ranked); Shanghai’s revolutionary heritage, and; Beijing’s Red Trail. These pilgrimages tend to be excruciatingly pedagogical, but also fun because they usually mean a day off work or school to hang with friends and eat snacks. The ideological […]
This short “border tour” emphasizes the training of British troupes in contrast to Chinese troupes, with clips of the Luohu border crossing as well as food and livestock being transported into the Colony from Wenjingdu. At his youtube site, Ben Mumford has also posted 8 Hong Kong Beat documentaries, which look at how the British […]
And this is not the opening to a joke, but a loose interpretation of a stanza from a new song celebrating the Shenzhen story. The stanza is: 海风在上海吹来；吹倒了蔡屋围的老房子；吹出了一堆亿万富翁；吹出了城市文明和一栋栋的高楼， which translates as: the sea breeze blew in across the seas; blew down the old houses of Caiwuwei; blew a pile of millionaires into existence; blew urban […]