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SPEAKER_08: Not just sneakers, but imitation Yeezys. Not just purses, but counterfeit Gucci clutches.
SPEAKER_04: Producer Vivian Lei.
SPEAKER_08: Shenzhen even has a mall that's famous for its faux versions of big designer brands. It's a popular destination for YouTubers to drop by and film click-baity videos titled, China's fake shopping malls are Shenzhen fake market insanity.
SPEAKER_06: What is up?
SPEAKER_04: Good morning. We're right now in Shenzhen and we are on the way once again to the fake market here. But first, let's get a future... Hey guys, don't forget to smash that subscribe button.
SPEAKER_08: But there's a small neighborhood within Shenzhen that will have you second guessing the line between fake and authentic.
SPEAKER_04: It's known for mass producing copies of the most celebrated works of Western art. Monets, Manet's, Matisses, all painted by hand, all painted quickly and all painted in one place.
SPEAKER_08: It's called Daffen Village.
SPEAKER_10: I had heard about Daffen Village and when I first heard about it, I thought, of course there's a village in China. That was completely uninterested because it seemed so stereotypical.
SPEAKER_08: This is Winnie Wong. She's an art historian and author of the book Van Gogh on Demand, China and the Ready Made. I used to take a lot of people through Daffen Village.
SPEAKER_10: And one time I was taking a woman from Hong Kong through it. And as we walked through, the first question she asked me was, which of these are the fakes?
SPEAKER_08: And I thought, well, that's actually a very complex question.
SPEAKER_08: We typically think of the craft of oil painting as a slow, meticulous, even romantic process. But the pace is dramatically different in Daffen. At its height, 60% of the world's oil paintings were made in this 0.4 square kilometer village by Chinese workers.
SPEAKER_04: This type of manufacturing is called trade painting. Trade painting is not necessarily art with a capital A. It doesn't command the same kind of respect because it's made quickly and cheaply in order to sell as generic decor. There's a very good chance that you've been in the presence of a painting made in Daffen.
SPEAKER_08: Perhaps you passed one at the dentist's office or in the conference room of a Marriott in Orlando. You may have even hung one up in your home without even realizing it.
SPEAKER_04: Daffen is a place that's been vilified, romanticized, and analyzed since it came into the world's collective consciousness specifically because of what it manufactures.
SPEAKER_10: If you think about it, it's completely arbitrary. But it's arbitrary in that it's a product of Western culture. That oil painting means something. Something different from a ceramic pot or an iPhone, right?
SPEAKER_08: We can imagine the mechanical processes involved in mass producing something like a lamp or exercise equipment. What happens in Daffen feels entirely different simply because the objects being mass produced are oil paintings.
SPEAKER_04: Prior to the 1980s, the city of Shenzhen was mostly farmland.
SPEAKER_08: And Daffen was just an ordinary rural village, not really known for anything in particular, let alone art. I have one photograph of it from probably 1970s and it is, yeah, just two, three rows
SPEAKER_10: of houses, one taller, we call it, diaolu, and a lot of fields. That's all. But Daffen's fate was very quickly transformed by a monumental moment in modern Chinese history,
SPEAKER_04: the creation of the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone.
SPEAKER_08: There's a legend about the founding of Shenzhen that in 1979, Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping drew a circle on the map by the South China Sea and determined that Shenzhen would be the home of China's first special economic zone. It would be a controlled area where China could open up to the rest of the world and experiment with market capitalism by offering special tax benefits to encourage foreign investment.
SPEAKER_04: It was a modern neoliberal fairy tale that was even celebrated in song. This song, actually, called Story of Spring.
SPEAKER_04: It depicts the moment when Shenzhen sprang forth from anonymity, mythically building a city that rose to the sky and mountains of gold, as if by magic.
SPEAKER_10: But it was not. There are very good historical strategic reasons to place a special economic zone there.
SPEAKER_04: If you want to know more about SEZs, you should go back and listen to the previous episode of 99% Invisible, the one right before this one. It involves a little airport in Ireland. I can't explain it here. Just listen to it. Okay, carry on.
SPEAKER_08: As Shenzhen rapidly transformed through the 1980s, businesses started moving there for the cheap real estate, inexpensive migrant labor, and low cost of living. Many of these businesses came from neighboring Hong Kong. Among all the first enterprising business people to move into Shenzhen were Hong Kong
SPEAKER_10: businessmen, of course, because they were right there.
SPEAKER_08: One of those early enterprising businessmen was a former painter named Huang Jiang.
SPEAKER_04: According to the plaques in Da Fen, in 1989, Huang Jiang traveled from Hong Kong and rented out a residential building in Da Fen with intent to manufacture and export oil paintings.
SPEAKER_08: Huang Jiang recruited a team of 20 painters and began churning out hand-painted copies of Picassos, Van Goghs, and Da Vinci's. Here he is in an interview explaining how he was able to divide the labor between many different painters. I taught them to paint as if they were on an assembly line.
SPEAKER_00: Some painted the sky, some painted the mountains, and others painted trees.
SPEAKER_09: When you divide the painting to different parts, it's easier for them to handle, especially for wholesale, because otherwise you cannot finish the painting.
SPEAKER_08: This is Jun Wang, associate professor in the Department of Public Policy at the City University of Hong Kong. Huang Jiang and other entrepreneurial painting bosses focused on copying famous works of Western art because any artist who had been dead for more than 50 years wasn't protected by Chinese copyright laws. But also, they were aiming to sell their products to businesses all over the world.
SPEAKER_09: Huang Jiang matters at that time, in an initial period, because he has the connection to quite a lot of Hong Kong dealers.
SPEAKER_08: All around Hong Kong, hotels, financial centers, and airports were being built. And those brand new buildings needed to be decorated with lots of cheap, nondescript art. But really, those connections to Hong Kong were important because that was the gateway to businesses in the West.
SPEAKER_04: Da Vin's oil paintings were sold and exported to hotels, real estate developers, and retailers like Kmart and Walmart. And painters were churning out wholesale orders just as quickly as the Western businesses were gobbling them up.
SPEAKER_08: It's actually pretty common for factory towns in mainland China to develop around a single type of production. There are areas that specialize in manufacturing only buttons or jeans or violins. And in this case, Da Vin developed around manufacturing oil paintings.
SPEAKER_10: When people came to Da Vin, in the first phase, it was really truly people with no education, like really people, rural people who had no outlet, but who had some aptitude. And maybe their parents or cousin or friends said, hey, you like painting. Why don't you come and try this? If a person was looking for work and had a little bit of artistic ability, Da Vin was
SPEAKER_08: the place to go.
SPEAKER_04: By the late 1990s, Da Vin had exported millions of artworks and the streets were becoming packed with painters, people stretching canvases, art supplies. Honestly, it's a little bit claustrophobic.
SPEAKER_05: We've never seen so many paintings.
SPEAKER_08: This is Philip Tinari, director and CEO of the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art.
SPEAKER_05: Streets and streets, you know, stores and stores that go on and go in. And there's just more than you could ever see.
SPEAKER_04: And you could find all sorts of paintings in Da Vin. The most well known were the replicas of famous works of Western art, the Mona Lisa, The Birth of Venus, etc. Then there was a smaller market for original creations by local artists.
SPEAKER_05: You had a wide variety of different kinds of production going on there, everything from a hotel decorator who would come in with an order for a few hundred canvases made to certain specs in terms of color and content.
SPEAKER_08: You could also commission a painter to copy any image. So if you had a picture of say, oh, I don't know, your boss singing karaoke at a staff retreat, you could actually email that photo to a painter in Da Vin and they would send that image back to you as an oil painting on canvas. Sorry, what was that? Nothing.
SPEAKER_05: It's sort of an earlier moment of e-commerce, but very primitive. But I think that was kind of an interesting way of looking at how images moved and were transformed and this moment when they're transformed from digital into physical and what that meant.
SPEAKER_08: Winnie Wang spent a lot of time in Da Fin and actually apprenticed as a painter in a workshop. She found out that some artists are easier to copy than others.
SPEAKER_10: The easiest paintings, then the lowest paid were Van Gogh paintings.
SPEAKER_04: And Van Gogh just can't catch a break.
SPEAKER_10: And then I, you know, I learned that there was a progression. You go from Van Gogh painting to Impressionism and then from Impressionism eventually to sort of French academic painting.
SPEAKER_08: And the hardest and most highly regarded style would be neoclassical paintings.
SPEAKER_10: So let's say a David with the coronation of Josephine would be like, you know, what you would paint to show that you've, you know, you can, you're a really good painter.
SPEAKER_08: Repetition, a strong network of workers and efficiency is how Da Fin painters were able to fulfill large wholesale orders. Wang says that the average painter could produce one to two paintings a day, but experienced workers could churn out much more.
SPEAKER_10: People would challenge themselves. One of my friends, he, you know, he explained, you know, he's like, I, I, he said, I didn't believe it too when I started. But I came to specialize in fruit paintings.
SPEAKER_08: This particular friend was really competitive, so kept working at it until he could figure out some shortcuts to reduce a painting down to a few brush strokes.
SPEAKER_10: And he said, you know, finally he reached the peak of 26 paintings a day. And he did it by using a specific set of brushes that he would, you know, tailor and in such a way that he could paint a grape with two stripes and an apple with three stripes. Right. So he developed essentially his own kind of repetitive method, his own specialized tools. Of course, not everyone was producing 26 paintings a day, but many painters could work very long
SPEAKER_04: and very tiring hours for not a lot of pay.
SPEAKER_08: But Jun Wang told me that, especially in the early years, most painters in Da Fen came from rural farming backgrounds who didn't have a pathway to a career in the arts. Also, painting was a very different type of creative labor that pushed against stereotypes of what migrant workers could do.
SPEAKER_09: Because of the discrimination, migrant workers are very tired about this image. They are either on construction site or in factories. So for many painter workers, they also take this as a success.
SPEAKER_08: If you ask a thousand different painters from Da Fen whether they're happy, you will probably get a thousand different answers. Everyone has their own motivations for going there and what they ultimately want to do.
SPEAKER_04: Da Fen painters probably would have continued quietly creating millions of the world's art replicas with little fanfare. But in the early 2000s, it happened to catch the attention of the government of Shenzhen.
SPEAKER_09: So Shenzhen is trying to change its image and become more high end. But Shenzhen doesn't really have that kind of a base, especially if you talk about culture. Shenzhen doesn't really have a long history. So for Chinese people, Shenzhen is a desert of culture.
SPEAKER_08: Wang says that Shenzhen had quickly become an epicenter for science and technology. But when it came to culture and social cohesion, the local government felt like it was behind, mostly because the city was still so new.
SPEAKER_04: The population of Shenzhen had exploded from around 59,000 people in 1980 to 7.7 million by the early 2000s, most of whom were migrant workers who came from all over the country with different local customs and even languages. And when it came to culture and the arts, leadership needed to start from scratch.
SPEAKER_08: This wasn't just unique to Shenzhen. A lot of areas of mainland China had undergone incredibly rapid urbanization. And by the early 2000s, the Chinese government was beginning to understand how fundamental cultural and creative industries like the arts or music were to urban and economic development. Science and technology parks were great for job creation, but they believed that if you wanted to foster a strong society, you needed things like museums, opera houses, and arts districts.
SPEAKER_04: In order to incubate creative development, the government decided to target interesting regions of the country, like Dafen, and promote them as cultural hubs.
SPEAKER_05: This is something that happens pretty often in Chinese urban development. Dafen had distinguished itself as this place where painting happens. And then what's the next step? Can you make it into a cultural hub? Can you make it into an art district? Can you build a museum? Can you attract tourists? You know, where do you go from there?
SPEAKER_04: However, the government wanted to lean away from the image of fake masterpieces because to them, replicating art was not the same thing as creating art. They didn't want Dafen to settle for being a copy village when it could be a center for original art and creativity.
SPEAKER_08: So the goal was to transform Dafen from a copycat village into a legitimate artist district, starting with its urban development.
SPEAKER_10: They did, you know, fix the sewage, you know, beautify the sidewalks. You know, they did do these things that one would expect a good government to do.
SPEAKER_08: The local government paved the roads and updated housing. They also formed artist associations, hosted cultural fairs, and offered incentives to attract art school-educated artists in order to bolster Dafen's art cred.
SPEAKER_04: The propaganda department even got involved to come up with more inventive ways to elevate Dafen's reputation.
SPEAKER_10: They hired a novelist to write a novel. There was a movie. There were songs. They made a television series.
SPEAKER_08: There were actually multiple television series based in Dafen, like this show called The Fate of Painting, about a woman who comes to a Dafen-like village to find her estranged father, but is confronted by secrets, romance, and art.
SPEAKER_04: The local government even took pains to address concerns of copyright infringement in Dafen.
SPEAKER_10: They handed out copyright law books. They held sessions on copyright infringement. They were concerned about this narrative that they were copyright infringers, and they wanted to promote creativity, originality.
SPEAKER_08: But as Dafen's profile rose, it didn't just gain the attention of the local government or artists. It was also starting to catch the attention of the rest of the world.
SPEAKER_04: Around the same time that Dafen was undergoing this government-led culture project, Western media outlets were beginning to catch wind of this small village in China that pumped out hand-painted replicas of Western works of art. The West had been buying these paintings for years, but most people were just now beginning to understand where they came from and who was making them.
SPEAKER_08: In the beginning, the international coverage was the opposite of what leadership was going for. A lot of news coverage focused on the image of an army of factory workers slaving away to pump out counterfeit paintings into the art market. There were headlines like,
SPEAKER_04: Own Original Chinese Copies of Real Western Art and Van Gogh from the Sweatshop
SPEAKER_05: There was a New York Times story early on, and I think it confirmed a lot of prejudices people had about China at that moment as a place where things were being knocked off and copied. And you know, what's the highest level of knockoff and copying? It's forging art.
SPEAKER_08: Here's Philip Tinari from the UCCA again. This is the moment of fake DVDs and counterfeit products and IP theft.
SPEAKER_05: So it was also easy to come at it from a lens of here they are copying this person or that person in a kind of piratical way where it wasn't. I'm not sure that was essentially what was going on.
SPEAKER_08: At the time, Dafen was being swept up into larger debates about China's place on the global stage. What was happening in Dafen was a complex intermingling of migrant labor, craft, local policy and globalism. But it was reduced into yet another story about how the West was the source of authenticity and China was ripping it off. Ironically, Dafen painters were being criticized for fulfilling a market that was created by the very people who demanded these paintings.
SPEAKER_04: Of course, art forgery can and does happen in China, but it also happens everywhere. Plus, no one believes that the $30 painting they ordered from Shenzhen was an original Gustav Klimt. These paintings were not intended to sit in a gallery or museum. They were meant to spruce up the wall of a conference room.
SPEAKER_08: By 2008, Dafen had undergone its urban makeover and it even formally changed its name to Dafen Oil Painting Village. But it was never quite able to shake its image as the copy capital of the world. It is very successful, very well known in terms of high concentration of painters.
SPEAKER_09: But at the same time, Dafen is always haunted by this image of copying. It might not have become the bastion for quote, original art, but the streets were cleaner,
SPEAKER_08: there was a lot more creative energy in the air, and the industry was booming. At least it was until… This is going to be one of the watershed days in financial markets history.
SPEAKER_01: It was a manic Monday in the financial markets. The Dow tumbled more than 500 points after two pillars of the street tumbled over the weekend.
SPEAKER_04: In 2008, the global financial crisis rocked Wall Street and reverberated throughout the rest of the world, even reaching the small painting village of Dafen.
SPEAKER_08: Before 2008, around 80% of the paintings made in Dafen were exported to the West. But the financial crisis had a severe impact on real estate development all over the world. Fewer construction projects meant that there were fewer blank walls that required cheap, unobjectionable decoration. Sales in Dafen plummeted by 50%.
SPEAKER_10: By 2015, it was very, very quiet in Dafen. And quiet, meaning there was a lot less business.
SPEAKER_08: But even though business dropped a lot for Dafen, it didn't disappear completely. With the Chinese real estate boom and with a rising middle class within the country, Dafen had a new Chinese market to tap into, which meant that there were different artistic styles to cater to. I know a while back the famous Van Gogh and the Mona Lisa, those used to be popular that's not so popular anymore.
SPEAKER_03: Just a few customers buy these kind of paintings.
SPEAKER_09: Most of the customers buy modern art and are very, very popular, very beautiful images.
SPEAKER_08: This is Chris Shih. He's the owner of a painting company called Shenzhen Melga Art that's been based in Dafen since 2017. He says that those replicas of classical Western art that put Dafen on the map aren't really in vogue anymore. His buyers want modern, abstract, and original paintings.
SPEAKER_04: In recent years, things have been more challenging in Dafen. Business never fully recovered after the 2008 financial crisis, and a lot of painters and bosses have moved out of the area because gentrification made it a less affordable place to live.
SPEAKER_08: The internet has made it possible to work from anywhere, so people have been moving to places with lower costs of living. There isn't as much reason to have a centralized painting industry anymore.
SPEAKER_08: Coming into reporting this, I thought that the type of labor that was happening in Dafen was wholly different from fine art, but I'm not so sure anymore. The truth is that the distinction between mass production and individual artistry has always been blurry. Artists all over the world like Jeff Koons have quietly used laborers and fabricators in order to execute their grand ideas. Dafen painters actually let us in on that process and show us that relationship in an unambiguous way.
SPEAKER_06: You could look at Damien Hirst or Koons and say, well, that's what they're doing, or go back to Warhol and the factory where really you're overseeing a project. You're sort of the architect of the project, but the labor is being done by multiple people or in multiple places or in multiple stages.
SPEAKER_08: This is Eddie Kola. He's a mixed media artist who spoke to me from beautiful, noisy East Oakland, California.
SPEAKER_04: A lot of notable artists have actually used Dafen painters sort of like ghostwriters. They come up with the concept and then outsource the labor to Dafen in order to execute their ideas because it's efficient.
SPEAKER_08: And Eddie thinks that there's actually something creative and undervalued happening in the mass manufacturing of oil paintings at places like Dafen. He decided to blur the line between production and art even further by incorporating the Dafen copying process into his artwork.
SPEAKER_06: I mean, part of the reason I want to go back to Dafen is because there's so many possibilities about what you could do as an artist.
SPEAKER_08: Eddie visited Dafen back in 2018 while he was doing an artist residency based in Shenzhen. And while he was there, he decided to conduct a bit of an artistic experiment. He had a graphic that he had designed. It was an image of a woman staring straight forward, sort of like in a passport photo. Aside from some red text running down the sides, it's a pretty monochromatic image, kind of like something from an edgy graphic novel. He chose a Dafen painter randomly and asked him to copy the graphic as an oil painting. About a week later, he got a message that the painting was ready. Then he repeated the process, asking another painter to make a copy of that copy.
SPEAKER_06: I went to pick it up and then just basically walk 20 or 30 feet down the street and handed the second painter the first copy. He said, can you copy this? And he was like, sure.
SPEAKER_08: He did this every week for seven weeks, each time bringing the newest copy of the copy of the image until he was left with six different paintings that all built upon the last version.
SPEAKER_06: And so the whole point of the process was how does the idea of copying something over and over again change? And it does. Like the last painting compared to the original painting are completely different.
SPEAKER_08: By the sixth painting, the image had changed in a ton of obvious and beautiful ways. While the first painting was muted and somber, the sixth painting was exploding with color. The subject of the painting even looks like a different person.
SPEAKER_04: One thing that's overlooked about oil paintings produced in Dafen is that they're not exact copies. Every painting is actually unique because it is done by hand. We just tend to focus on the similarities and not the differences.
SPEAKER_08: Eddie sees this project as a reflection of greater Shenzhen, a place that's been criticized by the West for copycat culture, when in fact, copying is an essential part of the artistic process or really any learning process for that matter. In his interpretation, the quote, real art can exist without the quote, fake art.
SPEAKER_06: We always start copying. In fact, I mean, that's how all knowledge really works. If you learn to play an instrument, they teach you how to play existing songs. They don't say, well, write an original composition. And so I think that's exactly the way all things evolve.
SPEAKER_08: Dafen labor has been used in a lot of different ways.
SPEAKER_04: Wait, hold on a second.
SPEAKER_08: When the West demanded affordable masterpieces, Dafen painters made them. When China wanted original works of art, Dafen created them. When professional artists needed skilled labor, Dafen supplied it.
SPEAKER_04: Okay, so I have this package from China. It's about two and a half feet by one and a half feet to Roman Mars.
SPEAKER_08: And when I reached out to a painting company in Dafen and asked them to create something truly absurd.
SPEAKER_02: This is a picture of me holding a microphone.
SPEAKER_08: Which was an oil painting of my boss doing karaoke at a staff retreat. They really delivered. And honestly, it was worth every penny.
SPEAKER_04: Now that is art right there. Vivian comes back to tell me about a curious byproduct of China's rapid urbanization. Villages in the middle of the city. After this. If you need to design visuals for your brand, you know how important it is to stay on brand. You just need to use their logos, colors and fonts in order to stay consistent. It's what makes them stand out. The online design platform Canva makes it easy for everyone to stay on brand. With Canva, you can keep your brand's fonts, logos, colors and graphics right where you design presentations, websites, videos and more. Drag and drop your logo into a website design or click to get your social post colors on brand. Create brand templates to give anyone on your team a design head start. You can save time resizing social posts with Canva magic resize. If your company decides to rebrand, replace your logo and other brand imagery across all your designs in just a few clicks. If you're a designer, Canva will save you time on the repetitive tasks. And if you don't have a design resource at your fingertips, just design it yourself. With Canva, you don't need to be a designer to design visuals that stand out and stay on brand. Start designing today at Canva.com, the home for every brand. Article believes in delightful design for every home and thanks to their online only model, they have some really delightful prices too. Their curated assortment of mid-century modern coastal, industrial and Scandinavian designs make furniture shopping simple. Article's team of designers are all about finding the perfect balance between style, quality and price. They're dedicated to thoughtful craftsmanship that stands the test of time and looks good doing it. Article's knowledgeable customer care team is there when you need them to make sure your experience is smooth and stress-free. I think my favorite piece of furniture in my house is the Geom sideboard. Maslow picked it out. Remember Maslow? And I keep my vinyl records and CDs in it. It just is awesome. I love the way it looks. Article is offering 99% invisible listeners $50 off your first purchase of $100 or more. To claim, visit article.com slash 99 and the discount will be automatically applied at checkout. That's article.com slash 99 for $50 off your first purchase of $100 or more. Squarespace is the all-in-one platform for building your brand and growing your business online. Stand out with a beautiful website, engage with your audience and sell anything. Your products, content you create and even your time. With member areas, you can unlock a new revenue stream for your business and free up time in your schedule by selling access to gated content like videos, online courses or newsletters. This summer, why not share your adventures with your followers in a newsletter or maybe make some fun video compilations of all your summer escapades. Now you can create pro-level videos effortlessly in the Squarespace Video Studio app. You can easily display posts from your social profiles on your website or share your new blogs or videos on social media, automatically push website content to your favorite channels so your followers can share it too. Plus use Squarespace's insights to grow your business. Learn where your site visits and sales are coming from and analyze which channels are most effective. Go to squarespace.com slash invisible for a free trial and when you're ready to launch, use the offer code invisible to save 10% off your first purchase of a website
SPEAKER_04: on or whatever and then you realize that there's this oil painting of your own face in the closet and they kind of walk away. Yeah, man this uh, Roman's really entered his megalomaniac phase I guess.
SPEAKER_08: He's got this oil painting of his face.
SPEAKER_04: It freaks out the kids a little bit. It has a very fun effect on the household. I'm very very happy with it. So I'm assuming you don't want to just talk about the oil painting of my face in the house. There's something that you researched that didn't make it into the story.
SPEAKER_08: Yes yes, you monsters actually cut it out of the script. But I really wanted to talk about urban villages, this thing called urban villages because Da Fen is sort of both a good and a bad example of one.
SPEAKER_04: So what exactly is an urban village?
SPEAKER_08: Yeah, so they're this very fascinating urban design phenomenon that came out of the rapid development of Shenzhen. So this also happens outside of Shenzhen but I'm just going to focus there because we're already there. That makes sense. If you were to look at Shenzhen today, it is like a gigantic megacity full of towering skyscrapers, technology parks, and these big open city blocks that were centrally planned and are managed by the government. So for the most part it looks like this cohesive, even futuristic metropolis. I've actually dropped a photo below to give you an idea of what it looks like from. Yeah, I mean it's amazing.
SPEAKER_04: Like multicolored fancy glass. It looks like a future city.
SPEAKER_08: Yeah, exactly. But you know when I say that it's cohesive for the most part, it's because scattered throughout the city are these small pockets of neighborhoods that actually disrupt the urban fabric of modern Shenzhen in this really interesting way. And these neighborhoods are the urban villages.
SPEAKER_04: So what do you mean by disrupt? Like what do they look like?
SPEAKER_08: So they're essentially these blocks within the city that developed entirely differently from the rest of centrally planned Shenzhen. Like I mentioned that most of the city is composed of giant steel and glass skyscrapers that seem super modern with these wide streets. But urban villages are these incredibly dense neighborhoods packed with multi-story apartment buildings divided by very narrow alleyways. And you can instantly tell that the same building codes do not apply in these places as the rest of Shenzhen because the apartment buildings, they're way smaller, like three to 10 stories tall, but they're just so densely built next to each other. Like they're so densely packed that they're actually called handshake buildings because supposedly you could reach your arm out the window and shake the hand of the person in the next building.
SPEAKER_04: Whoa, okay. You're talking very, very close. Yes, very, very close together.
SPEAKER_08: So these apartments are also mixed use. So people might live in the floors above and then down below there's like, it's like bustling with markets and shops and restaurants and schools. And I actually have another picture of the meeting point between an urban village and the rest of the city. Okay.
SPEAKER_04: So we're looking at a sort of top-down view of, you know, buildings surrounding like tall buildings surrounding and then a real like mishmash hodgepodge of buildings at different angles and different heights. And it really is very, very different. It's just like this informal enclave, like enveloped by, you know, square angle rest of the city. So you mentioned that the building codes are different. I mean, are they just regulated completely differently than the rest of Shenzhen?
SPEAKER_08: Yeah. So while most of Shenzhen is managed by the government, these urban villages are owned and managed by village collectives, which is why, you know, the same building codes don't apply to them and why their development almost looks improvisational compared to the rest of the city.
SPEAKER_04: So if the rest of Shenzhen was so meticulously planned, how did urban villages, you know, come about?
SPEAKER_08: If you were to go back to the creation of the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone in 1980, you know, Shenzhen was chosen as the location for a number of reasons, but a key reason was because it was this very rural area with a lot of farmland prior to the 1980s. So it was much more sparsely populated, but there were still, you know, tens of thousands of people who lived there prior to the SEZ. These are people that we call, you know, original villagers. And it's kind of interesting because people tend to hype up the idea that Shenzhen was built from nothing and it was this blank slate prior to the Shenzhen SEZ and, you know, it sprang forth because of, you know, capitalism or whatever. But, you know, the presence of the original villagers actually had this huge impact on, you know, the development of the SEZ.
SPEAKER_04: In what way did they have an impact?
SPEAKER_08: When Shenzhen was selected as the location of the first SEZ, the government bought up all of that vast uninhabited farmland, but it did not purchase the plots of land that the original villagers actually built their homes on, meaning the actual village community land where the houses were. Huh.
SPEAKER_04: Why not? It seems like that's a thing you do.
SPEAKER_08: Yeah. Like, apparently it was just like too expensive to buy that land and relocate the actual people. So the government just let them stay and manage those plots of lands themselves and then built the rest of Shenzhen around these villages. So these villages literally became surrounded by skyscrapers. Oh, okay.
SPEAKER_04: So they really predate everything and they just built around them, which is actually like, I don't know, it's kind of a good sign. They didn't just move them and bulldoze them. That's so much of world history is built on that premise that it's kind of a nice, I don't know, change of pace. Yeah.
SPEAKER_08: It's shockingly nice. Surprisingly nice. Just given history.
SPEAKER_04: Yeah. So how did these urban villages grow to what they look like today? Because I can't imagine the original houses and villages that used to occupy the space look like this. I mean, they look like urbanized areas. They just look like a different kind of urbanization than the skyscrapers around them.
SPEAKER_08: Yes, exactly. So, you know, the original villagers, they didn't have this farmland to make a living off anymore after the creation of the SEZ. But there was this huge opportunity because they had their hands on this prime real estate that was in the middle of a very rapidly growing city. So what the original villagers ended up doing is they formed village collectives to manage the land and then they tore down their houses that were there and then constructed these really dense multi-story apartment buildings to run out to like the millions of new migrants that were flocking to Shenzhen for job opportunities. Wow.
SPEAKER_04: So they really just bought into the whole, like, we're going to become a capitalist economy, right? Yeah, they just leaned right into it. Okay. Good. Good for them.
SPEAKER_08: So the remarkable thing about urban villages is that, you know, spatially they only make up a small part of the city, but by the year 2000, they housed essentially half of the population of Shenzhen.
SPEAKER_04: Oh my God. That doesn't compute from the pictures I see. Yeah. That's really, really insane. So these are really dense. Like people are really packed on top of each other. And it makes it seem like also that those buildings surrounding these urban villages are not very dense. Like they don't have enough housing for people.
SPEAKER_08: Yeah, exactly. So urban villages basically became some of the only affordable housing options for a lot of migrant workers in Shenzhen. So you know, for a lot of new low income residents, you have like students, restaurant workers, construction workers, factory workers, basically blue collar workers. Urban villages are, you know, the first stops when trying to find housing in Shenzhen because it's a very expensive city. And because you could find all of these different types of people and different types of shops and resources condensed into one small area, urban villages are full of life and really have become the center of a lot of culture.
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, nothing's more dead than some dumb business district with tall buildings, right?
SPEAKER_08: Exactly. Yeah. So, you know, earlier when I said that Dafen is a good and a bad example of an urban village, you know, it's a good example because it's a similarly dense multi-use neighborhood that developed in this very different way from the rest of Shenzhen. But it's also a bad example because Dafen was a place that was given a lot of special treatment and attention by the government because it already had this flourishing painting industry. So Dafen was allocated money to modernize its infrastructure, but urban villages on the whole are not places that get a lot of respect. And what do you mean by that?
SPEAKER_08: So because these are spaces that are accessible to the poor, urban villages are often associated with overcrowding, shoddy construction. They're also linked with drug use and seen as dangerous areas. Of course, it's been debated how much of that reputation is just classism. So urban villages, especially in the last couple of decades, have been targeted for quote, urban renewal. And a lot of them have been torn down and redeveloped into more modern housing that more closely fits into that master plan for the rest of the city. But when urban villages get demolished, like hundreds of thousands of people get displaced from their homes.
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, I definitely can recognize that maybe urban villages have their problems. But not having affordable housing in the center of a large city is a problem that all cities seem to have. Like they just seem to push low wage workers that work in the city and serve people's needs further and further away and have to commute. And it just makes life harder for the people that we rely on. These people that we call essential workers at this point because of the pandemic. It's just, it's really awful to see that happen everywhere. Yeah, yeah, that's totally right.
SPEAKER_08: And I think it's really important in the case of urban villages, it's really important to understand how important they've been to Shenzhen's success. I spoke with a professor of architecture and urban design named Zhan Du, who actually has written extensively about Shenzhen. And she said that if you were to think about it from an ecological point of view, she compared urban villages to the wetlands of the city because they've provided all of this overlooked support to its overall health and development. Yeah, I mean, these interstitial places where people have a little bit more freedom to solve
SPEAKER_04: problems and create the spaces that they need to live and become like little places to experiment. They're exactly like creating a healthy ecology with lots of different niches being fulfilled and represented. I mean, not everyone can live in a gleaming downtown skyscraper. Yeah, totally. We know that.
SPEAKER_08: Yes, we know that firsthand. Well, this is fascinating stuff.
SPEAKER_04: I mean, I just, I'm so intrigued by these places. They're very cinematic and I think they are a little odd to us in different ways, but they serve this vital purpose of figuring out like how people actually need to live and it's important to pay attention to what services they provide. But it's a fascinating space and I'd love to hear more about them. I can't believe us monsters told you not to talk about it. See, I knew it.
SPEAKER_08: No, it's super fascinating stuff.
SPEAKER_04: Well, thanks for bringing this little extra information to us. I really appreciate it.
SPEAKER_08: Thank you for letting me rant about it.
SPEAKER_04: 99% Invisible was produced this week by Vivien Leigh, edited by Emmett Fitzgerald, mix and tech production by Martine Gonzalez, fact checking by Graham Hacia, music by our director of sound Swan Rial with additional music by Jenny Conley-Drizos, John Neufeld and Nate Creary. Delaney Hall is the executive producer. Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director. The rest of the team includes Christopher Johnson, Lasha Madone, Joe Rosenberg, Chris Berupay, Jason De Leon, Sophia Klatsker and me, Roman Mars. Special thanks this week to Lo Zoui and Juan Du, whose interviews did not make it into the piece, but if you want to read more about the complexities of Shenzhen Special Economic Zone, Juan wrote a great book about it called The Shenzhen Experiment, the story of China's instant city. You should check it out. We are part of the Stitcher and Sirius XM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building in beautiful uptown Oakland, California. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet me at Roman Mars and the show at 99PI.org. We're on Instagram and Reddit too. You can find links to other Stitcher shows I love, as well as every past episode of 99PI and also pictures of that creepy oil painting that Viv had commissioned of my face at 99PI.org.
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